“You like it?” he asked, both hands around my waist now, and I nodded. Holy hell, I liked it.
His cheekbones were thrown into prominence, the angles of his face in relief without his long hair. What was left was about two inches long, and Maggie had arranged it with stylish indifference in mind. His hair looked darker without all of the sun-bleached length. Sunlight streaming in through the wide front windows caught him from behind, further dazzling my eyes. I swore his eyelashes were long enough to cast shadows over his face. His blue-gray eyes crinkled merrily at the corners as he grinned and said, “Your cheeks are on fire, baby.”
“And my ice cream is melting,” I said, my breath a little short.
“Here, let me,” he said helpfully, plucking the cone from my hand and twirling it around on his tongue.
“Now you’re just being cruel,” I said, pretending to be irritated, and he grinned even more, his eyes truly devilish.
“Come on, I’ll take you on a tour of my hometown,” he invited.
“Have a good day!” one of the girls behind the counter called as we headed back outside.
“Oh, we will,” Bly murmured just for my ears, still licking at the strawberry ice cream. He caught my hand in his as we walked, asking, “So, it looks all right?”
“Are you just fishing for a compliment?” I teased him, swinging our joined hands.
He angled me a teasing look, crunching on the cone now.
“You are gorgeous,” I said then. “But not just on the outside.” For the first time since this morning I truly allowed myself to think about everything Christy had told me last night. Blythe, sweetheart, tell me yourself. Trust me enough to tell me.
“Aw, baby,” he said then, finishing the last of the cone in one bite. He stopped and turned to me, hugging me hard to his chest for a moment, there on the sidewalk of his hometown, the sun beating down on us.
“You are, you know,” I told him, and he smoothed hair back from my forehead, inadvertently displacing my sunglasses.
“Sorry,” he murmured, settling them back over my eyes and then punctuating the word with a soft kiss.
He drove me around for the rest of the afternoon, pointing out everything that I requested, from his high school to the place where he’d had his first job (the local grocery store, a place called County Beef).
“They sell everything, not just meat,” he’d explained, and I punched his arm.
“I tried wrangling one summer,” he said, after we’d ordered fries from a drive-through window.
“As in horse wrangling?” I asked. I’d kicked off my shoes and was sitting with my feet propped on the dashboard, the greasy container of fries we were sharing balanced on my knees. Both of us were doing everything to keep the shadow of Bly’s appearance before a judge from our thoughts.
“Yeah, there’s lots of beef ranchers in this area, and I worked at one of the local places before senior year. It was tough work. I’d never really been on a horse, but I thought it couldn’t be that hard. Boy, was I wrong. Mom had a regular who helped me get the job. It was his brother’s place and they needed extra hands.”
“Did you wear a cowboy hat?” I asked, trying to sound innocent.
“Why yes, I did,” he said, and I didn’t have to look his way to know he was smiling.
“Do you still have it?” I asked next.
“What are you saying?” he teased.
“I’ve never worked anywhere but Shore Leave,” I said then.
“What about when you lived in Chicago?”
“My only job there was raising the girls. I probably should have found a job after Ruthann was in school. Even just for the sake of seeing other adults, making friends. To this day my best friend is still Jillian.”
Bly shrugged. “That’s cool. I think you’re lucky if you have one best friend, instead of a hundred acquaintances that don’t actually give a shit about you. Besides, I’d say she feels the same about you. Before you got to Landon last May, she talked about you all the time.”
I smiled, missing her; how in the hell had I managed to live apart from my family for over a decade and a half?
“And I asked her questions about you all the time, just to hear more about you. God, I was already fascinated by you, even when I hadn’t met you.”
“You were, really?” I asked. “I mean, you’ve said that before. I can tell you I was fascinated the moment I met you. But then again, I hadn’t heard about you until the minute we arrived.”
He caught my knee in one hand and squeezed, and I snatched it away before he could start tickling me again. “Don’t you dare! I’ll choke,” I warned, holding up a french fry to illustrate my point.
“I just want to touch you,” he said, coaxing me with his tone, easing his palm over my leg again. I allowed it this time. He smoothed his fingers over my skin, gently. “When you came into the café that first night it was like you’d taken all the air out of the room.”
I admitted, “I felt exactly the same. You know it. But I didn’t dare acknowledge it. I thought about you every second and I felt guilty as hell.”
“Every second?” he teased. I peeked over at him to see his lips curve into a self-satisfied grin. “I thought so, even if you totally ignored me all the time. But I sensed how you felt. You watched me when you thought I couldn’t tell.”
I squeaked in indignation, even knowing what he said was true. I admitted, “I did. I couldn’t stop myself, and it was like being tortured.”
“That night I saw you and Jillian at Eddie’s, I pretended I just noticed the golf cart. But I was practically stalking you. That was the first night I thought there might actually be hope. The way you looked at me when I left…”
I felt my cheeks heating at his words. “I would have jumped in your arms if you’d even hinted,” I told him.
“And then at Trout Days, that was the first time I touched you.”
“You caught my elbow,” I remembered.
“I wanted to kiss you so bad when you turned around,” he said. “And then to watch you dancing all night. Talk about torture.”
“You found me walking the next night,” I said, my heart speeding up just remembering.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said, again sending a grin my way. “I was dying to find any excuse to get you alone, and there you were, just walking along the side of the road. I was like, This is it, this is what you’ve been waiting for.”
“Really?” I thrilled at the thought. “It took all of my willpower not to climb all over you when I got in the truck. And then you kissed me, under the fireworks.”
“It was so right,” he said, low and sweet. “I knew I wanted you, but I had no idea how much until I kissed you.” His hand tightened around my thigh and I cupped mine around it, curling my fingers through his. “Joelle, I’m so in love with you. I wasn’t expecting to fall in love.”
“Blythe,” I whispered. “Oh, Blythe. God, I love you.” I closed my eyes, blocking out the sunny, late afternoon that stretched before the windshield of the truck.
“Baby,” he said, and his voice was pained. “I want to come back with you to Landon so bad. I love it there.”
“But?” I asked, almost afraid to speak the word, my voice soft.
“I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Or Wednesday…whenever I go before a judge. I might get sent back to jail. I don’t know. Fuck, I just don’t know.”
I tightened my grip on his hand and said, sincerely, “Blythe, I will wait for you no matter how long it takes. I want you to know that. I don’t care that you’ve been to jail. Sweetheart, your mom…” I trailed off, my heart thudding hard against my breastbone. I felt a trickle of sweat skim between my breasts that had nothing to do with the hot, dusty afternoon. “She told me…she told me about…”
I saw his jaw tighten and he closed his eyes for a moment. A fraction of a second later he opened them, accelerated a little, and drove us out of town. I sat in tense silence, though he didn’t seem angry; rather, on a
mission. He took a side road after a few miles, heading west. Less than a mile later the road had wound up the side of a small bluff, which was lined with cottonwood trees. At the top of this he pulled into a clearing and parked; we had a bird’s eye view of Brandt in the distance, its old-fashioned silver water tower glinting in the slanting sun. We were utterly alone and I was still clinging to Blythe’s hand. He rubbed his thumb gently over my palm for a moment.
At last he asked, “Mom told you about Julianne?”
It hurt me to hear the suppressed pain in his voice. I turned to face him, though his gaze was still directed out the window. I nodded.
“I suppose I should hate her, but I don’t,” he said, running his free hand through his hair, standing it on end. It was a trivial thing to notice, but I reflected how he wouldn’t have been able to do that this morning, when his hair had still been a foot long. He looked different, there was no question, but he was still my Blythe, from his bowed lips and smoky eyes to wide shoulders and long legs. And his dear, kind, compassionate soul, which was far more beautiful than anything else. Again I marveled at what a tender person he truly was, how very much I loved him. I was terrified I couldn’t live without him anymore, and would have to, if he wouldn’t come back with me. My insides seized up at just the thought.
“We dated for about six months,” he said, and sighed. “I was 21 and she was 18, and my first serious girlfriend since high school. I met her through Tony—” and with that name his voice snagged on a bitter note. “He was my boss at the time. We did construction, mostly framing and roofing. Julianne would visit the job sites and I finally asked her out. But I never loved her. I know that’s not the point, but I didn’t. I liked her, I wanted to have sex with her, but that’s where it ended. Tony wasn’t crazy about us being together…he thought she was too young. Shit, I don’t even know how it happened. She was on the pill and we used condoms.” He stopped himself and swallowed hard, turning abruptly and looking deeply into my eyes. My heart caught for a second and then took up a rapid beat. He asked, “Joelle, is it all right to tell you this? God, if you told me about having sex with another man I would want to kill him.”
I laughed a little, a release of tension, and said truthfully enough, “I want you to tell me. Please. I really do.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice soft. He drew a deep breath, running his palm again over my bare leg. “Okay. But somehow she ended up pregnant. She told me and I was shocked, but I would have done right by her. I would have supported her. God, she cried and cried, like it was the end of the world. Said her brother would kill her. I told her it wasn’t Tony’s fucking business, but she wouldn’t listen. He was so protective of her, I should have suspected she might do something extreme. I found out later that she’d had issues with depression in high school, had cut on herself and some of that. But God, Joelle, I never thought she’d do what she did. Without even telling me.” His eyes were bearing into mine, and it was like a razor over my soul to see the tears he wouldn’t allow to fall. They sparked in the corners as he said, his voice husky with pain, “And then she called me from Oklahoma City just a week later. And said she’d made a decision.” [Can Tony be her brother or father or something? - MTO He is her brother I just reread the above and I don’t see where it says that he’s her brother. Can that be added in?]“Blythe,” I whispered, aching for him. In the back of my mind I was picturing Camille as she’d looked when she told me she was pregnant, hardly more than two weeks ago. God, my firstborn, my baby. If I thought she’d even considered such a thing…
He continued, “I would have begged her to reconsider, but it was already done. She’d been in and out of some place there, I never found out where, but it was done. And I just went crazy. Screamed at her, swore at her, told her she’d go to hell for what she’d done. I’m sorry about all of that now, for saying those things. But I felt it. Later I found out she’d told Tony that I forced her to get an abortion, that I’d made her do it. I was at work that day, and Tony grabbed my phone from me and he was yelling at her, and then he threw my phone like it was a grenade and punched me right in the face. He wasn’t a wimp, either. I went down, but I was so angry, Joelle, all I could remember later was a red haze. Two of the other guys we worked with had to pull me off of him, and he was bleeding all over the place. His blood was all over my hands. It was like a scene from a terrible movie. I ran to his truck and took off. And no more than 20 minutes later the cops had me pulled over, guns drawn, like I was some fugitive. Apparently there was a folder in his glove compartment with money he was planning to take to the bank, and so I was a thief twice over.”
I couldn’t find words, but I didn’t look away from his eyes. He was clutching my leg with one hand as though it was a life vest and he’d just come up for the third time.
“So I got arrested, and had to go to court then too. I suppose I should be grateful I was only sentenced to nine months. And I got out after three. It wasn’t anything like you see on TV, but it was humiliating. I still feel like such a loser, a criminal. And I never got to confront Julianne. She called me once, while I was still behind bars, and said she was sorry. God, I could hardly talk to her I had such a lump in my throat. I hung up on her. I spent all those nights in that cell on that piece of shit bunk mattress and all I could think about was my child that I’d never get to meet. I have never felt so guilty. So betrayed and helpless. It was the worst time in my life.” Again he paused and drew a breath. His eyes softened as he looked at me in silence for a moment. He lifted his hands and cupped my face so tenderly that the tears I’d been trying to hold back came spilling over.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, and he shook his head.
“Don’t cry,” he said, low. “It’s all behind me now. It still hurts, and I still think about the baby sometimes. I imagine what he or she would be like. He’d be almost two or so by now. You know what Joelle, my sweet girl, when I saw how much you loved your girls that made me love you all the more. God, I love you. I can’t even tell you how much.”
I sobbed, turning my face against his right hand. He pulled me to him instantly and I clung, sobbing for him and the story he’d just told me, for my own daughter who was carrying the child of a man who wouldn’t be there for her, and for this incredible love that I’d found when I least expected it. Blythe had given me so much more than he would ever know. And, God help me, I would do everything in my power to keep him with me.
“Shhh,” he soothed, his lips against my temple. “It’s all right.”
“I’m sorry,” I said finally, choking back my tears and managing a deep breath. I drew back, determined, and lined his face with my hands. “And I’m glad you told me. I understand so much more now.”
He smiled his sweet smile, the one that lifted the right side of his mouth higher than the left. “I would have told you, it’s just so hard to talk about. I don’t want you to think that I haven’t moved beyond it, because in most ways I have. And I try to have more control over my temper these days, it’s just when I thought Jackson was hurting you, I didn’t think, I just reacted.” His eyes were intent on mine as he cupped my face and said, “Joelle, what I feel for you is the strongest thing I’ve ever felt in my life. When I told you in the jail in Landon that you should go, I wanted to fucking die. And you came here anyway, you came after me.” His voice was full of wonder. He smoothed his big warm hands down my neck, my waist, before cupping my breasts with infinite gentleness. I drew in a breath. He circled his arms and pulled me close again, breathing against my hair. I wrapped my arms around his neck and held him like I’d dreamed about holding him all of those nights back home, after we’d first met and I couldn’t acknowledge how I really felt.
He murmured, “You smell just like a peach.”
I laughed again, this time from happiness. Against his neck I muttered, “You sweet talker.”
He kissed my temple and whispered, “Did you sleep all right last night? I was glad you were in my old bed, even if I couldn’t be in it wi
th you.”
“I can’t imagine you fitting into that tiny space,” I said, fitting myself against his strong chest. He was pressing soft, teasing kisses down the side of my neck, his hands busy sliding under my sundress. He reached my panties and slipped his fingers over the top of them. I shifted my legs so he could pull them down, kicking off my sandals and then hooking a leg over his hips.
“There’s another place I’d like to fit just now,” he said, his eyelids lowering in the seductive way that made my blood turn to fire. His hands were around my hips, his grip firm. I lifted my arms and he delicately pulled the dress over my head, and then his hands moved swiftly to unhook my bra. I shivered with pleasure as he pressed me to his mouth and opened his lips over my nipples, which swelled against his tongue.
“Aw, baby, you taste so good,” he said, his breath warm on my breasts, and I wound my fingers into his short hair.
“It feels so different,” I murmured, running my nails along his scalp, and he shivered, taking one nipple lightly between his teeth. I gasped a little. “But I like it.”
“Good,” he said, kissing the warm skin between my breasts, his hands splayed over my naked back.
“I like it very much,” I clarified breathlessly.
Bly lifted his head and shifted, taking me with him, and I pulled off his shirt while he got out of his jeans, then he hauled me back against him, both of us lying now on the bench seat. He was naked, and so hard, and I reached with one hand to clutch him tight. He groaned and bent a knee over my hips, brushing the hair away from my flushed cheeks. Already I was like a torch, burning up beneath his hands. His voice lowered to a husky murmur as he said, “The first night I kissed you I didn’t know where it would go. But now I can touch you, and kiss you, whenever, wherever…” and he lowered his lips to my throat, trailing kisses again between my breasts and down my belly while his hands skimmed along my ribs and then behind my thighs. He curled both hands around my knees and eased them apart, and spiraled his tongue between my legs until I was gasping, my head bent back against the seat. He was so amazing at what he did, my world ceased to mean anything but desire for those moments. When at last he lifted his head he was breathing hard, his eyes blue fire.
Second Chances Page 8
