Love and Protect

by Lori Ryan

  “I was just thinking that I need to find a way to support myself and the baby. I can’t live off you guys forever.”

  “Try telling that to Mama. I think she’s planning to adopt you,” said Cade.

  Laura felt a sharp pain at his joke and had a feeling she probably grimaced. What would it have been like to be born to May Bishop? To have been raised in a place like this by someone who loved her? To receive the unconditional love that a parent is supposed to have for their child?

  Fairy tales… She’d given up on things like that a long time ago. It wasn’t useful to sit and pity herself and cry about her circumstances. But, being so close to a family like the Bishops made her want to go back in time and rewrite her story. If not rewrite who she was born to, at least change her decision to marry Patrick.

  “Well, I’ll have to come up with something,” Laura said, but in all honesty waiting tables was about the only thing she was qualified to do.

  She forced a smile. She may not have had a mother like May Bishop, but she’d make damn sure her child did. Her baby would know she was loved no matter what. That nothing could ever take her mother’s love away. If Laura was sure of one thing in her life, she was sure of that. She would love this child with all her heart and all that she was.

  “What do you like to do?” Cade asked, as if the answer to her problems was as simple as that.

  She frowned. Her life had revolved first around feeding her father and keeping his house, and later keeping Patrick’s schedule and meeting the social demands of being one of the Kensingtons. She had no real skills she could use to get a job.

  My greenhouse.

  “I like to grow things. I like the way you can tell how healthy and alive the plants are in a greenhouse by how much chatter you can hear from them when you walk in. If they’re healthy and well cared for, they talk to you the second you walk in and the hum is almost deafening.” Laura glanced at Cade and was surprised to see he actually looked like he understood, like he didn’t think she was crazy or stupid for thinking her plants spoke to her.

  “Then that’s what you should do. We’ll come up with a way for you to make a living growing things,” he said and shoved himself up off the bale. “Let’s go see if Mama has lunch ready yet. I’m starved.”

  Laura felt a smile tug at the corners of her mouth. One thing she’d noticed around here was Cade sure didn’t miss a meal.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “It’s been almost two weeks, damn it. How the hell can one woman evade you for two weeks? She’s got to be here somewhere!” Alec yelled into the phone after Mark finished his report. They’d found nothing. Not a damn thing.

  The same not-a-damn-thing Alec had found when he’d searched Patrick and Laura’s house. If Patrick had collected evidence of Alec’s creative accounting measures and the bribes he’d paid to win the contracts they’d been awarded over the years, it wasn’t anywhere in the house. That only left Laura. She had to have it. And, that meant he needed to have her.

  “Go see that doctor again. Press him. There must be something there. And pay whatever the hell you have to for the damn security tapes from the hospital. Someone will sell them to you. There’s a price for everything. Find their price!”

  Alec slammed down the phone. Where the hell was Laura Kensington hiding? He threw his coffee mug across the office where it hit the wall, leaving a gouge in the plaster he’d have to find some way to cover. Great. One more thing to take care of.

  *

  Laura leaned the basket of vegetables on her hip and carried them into the house. Helping May in her garden was turning out to be as relaxing as working in her greenhouse. More so, in fact, since she and May could now cook what they had grown together. She’d never seen a Japanese eggplant, but May assured her she would love the way it thickened the pasta sauce they would make with it.

  “Those look beautiful, Laura,” May said as she picked up the tomatoes and green beans and placed them by the sink to wash. “We’ll have to can some of these tomatoes. Have you ever canned fruits and vegetables?”

  Laura shook her head as she got out the cutting board and a knife.

  “It’s actually silly that we call it canning, since we’ll use jars, but I’ll teach you how to do it.” May leveled Laura with a look. “Before you move on, I mean.”

  This time Laura nodded, not quite knowing what to say. She knew May didn’t want her to leave, and part of her was beginning to wonder if perhaps she could stay. No, wonder, wasn’t the right word.

  Hope.

  But she’d learned hope hurts.

  Hope. Hurt. Hope. Hurt. It was like a singsong cadence in Laura’s head that wouldn’t stop. Hope leads to hurt and Laura didn’t want to hurt anymore. She’d hurt enough.

  “You know, Laura. It occurred to me that before you leave it might be a good idea for you to talk to me about what happened to you.” May said it casually, as if she were asking about the weather outside.

  Laura’s hands stilled but she didn’t reply. She stood frozen. The idea of talking about what Patrick had done to her was absolutely mortifying. How could she tell anyone? How could she ever share those details?

  “You’ll be moving on soon, I suppose, so it would be like having a get-out-of-jail-free card. You get to tell someone about your time with your husband, but you don’t have to worry about the repercussions. You don’t have to worry about what I might think or how I’ll view you because of what you tell me. You can just get it off your chest before you go.”

  May went on washing vegetables and handing them to Laura to cut up as if she hadn’t just opened an enormous can of worms. She continued to talk, explaining the way she had prepped the raised beds for the lettuce she grew, and told Laura she’d show her where the composter was to put the scraps in. So much like her son, just talking about everyday stuff until Laura somehow let down her walls.

  Before Laura knew what had happened, she had tears running down her face and she’d stopped cutting. She moved blindly to the kitchen table and sank into a chair. May just waited, chopping and stirring and adding things to a pot on the stove. She handed Laura a dish towel for her tears, before she turned back to the stove once more as if nothing were happening behind her.

  “I didn’t love him. Not even before I knew what he was, I mean. He was older than me, but he was attractive and paid so much attention to me. It was flattering to have someone like him pay so much attention to me. He seemed sweet and caring and he was going to take me away from my dad, which, well—that was a good thing.” Laura dabbed at her cheeks with the towel, but the tears were replaced with fresh ones so quickly, it had no real effect.

  “My brother saw what Patrick really was. He knew somehow and tried to tell me. He tried to convince me to move in with him and we’d share a house together, but neither one of us had a job that paid much. I was waitressing and he was working at a hardware store stocking shelves. Neither of us had gone to college. I thought if I didn’t weigh him down with trying to take care of me he might put himself through community college someday. I thought Patrick might send me…. But I shouldn’t have married a man I didn’t love. I shouldn’t have done that just to get out of the situation I was in.”

  She blew out a deep breath, and it felt as though some of the humiliation and pain of her marriage left her with it. “My dad threatened to disown me if I married Patrick, although I’ve never really been sure why. He used to tell me how worthless I was, how useless a girl was to him. But, I think he didn’t want me to marry Patrick because it meant he’d need someone else to cook and clean for him—or he’d have to learn to do it himself. Of course, his threat only made the thought of marrying Patrick all the more appealing.”

  May came and sat with Laura at the table and held her hand while she talked. “I was so stupid,” Laura all but whispered, then just stayed like that for a long time, letting the tears clean away a little bit of the pain.

  “When did it start?” May prompted, not addressing whether Laura had been
stupid or foolish or just naive. Laura looked at her through the tears. She never thought she’d tell the details of her life with Patrick to anyone. It was too humiliating. She didn’t want people to see her as the kind of woman who would let someone do that to her, even though that’s exactly what she was. Exactly what she’d become.

  “On our honeymoon. He couldn’t, um…when we tried to…” Laura waved her hands. “You know. When we tried, well, he couldn’t. He flew into a rage. I’d never seen anything like it. He told me it was my fault, that it was me. I was a virgin. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. You know that, don’t you?” May asked.

  Laura nodded, but didn’t look at the older woman. “He hit me.” Laura’s hand went to her neck at the memory of that night. “Choked me.”

  Laura wasn’t crying any longer. She stared at a scratch on the big oak table, remembering the way hitting her had gotten Patrick excited, the way he’d raped her as dark spots swam at the corner of her eyes. “Raped me,” she whispered to herself.

  She looked up at May. “The funny thing is, not all abusive husbands apologize the next day. You always read that, don’t you? How they send flowers and apologize and tell their wives it won’t ever happen again? It’s not true. Patrick didn’t care. He wasn’t sorry. He never sent flowers or tried to make it up to me. It was just who he was.”

  As she spoke, the stories began to flow, coming more and more easily.

  “In the beginning, he was very careful not to hit me in the face. He didn’t leave marks I couldn’t cover with long sleeves or a turtleneck. As time went on, his anger seemed to spiral and he wasn’t able to keep things as controlled any longer. There were times when I couldn’t leave the house for days.”

  May listened while Laura told her more than she ever thought she’d share with anyone. Her brother’s death, and the resulting beating when she wanted to cancel a business dinner to go to the funeral. The way Patrick would drag her down the steps by her hair or throw her against the wall so hard the house shook. What it felt like to have a hot pan held against her skin when she didn’t cook the right thing for dinner.

  She told about the sick games he’d play where she’d have to go get whatever it was he wanted to hit her with. She’d have to get him his belt or the length of hose he was fond of using. And the sick thing was, she’d know whether he would rape her after or not by how the beating went. When she had to get something he’d use to hit her with, it always ended with sex. As if the beating was foreplay for him.

  Sitting at May’s kitchen table, Laura let out years of grief and anger and guilt and self-doubt. Everything came pouring out of her. Her plan to run. Her hope to keep her baby safe. It all came pouring out until there were no more words. There was nothing more to do than let May hold her and rock her, and as she sat there in May’s arms she began to let go of three years of absolute terror.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Shane stood at the bottom of a ladder in their dad’s old barn in an unused pasture behind the house. They called the building their father’s “Tinker Barn” because he’d filled it with work benches and shelves and tools and places to tinker. It still stood even though his father had been gone for years.

  He called up to Cade a second time but got no answer. Tinny music blared through the speakers of the radio Cade had had since they were teenagers. How that thing still worked, Shane didn’t know. He could also hear the sound of Cade’s fists hitting one of the heavy bags that hung from the ceiling.

  When they were teenagers, their daddy had turned the loft of his tinker barn into a gym of sorts for Cade and Shane. There were weights and two heavy bags and a couple of striking bags suspended from the ceiling. It was a place for his boys to blow off steam when they needed to, and both Shane and Cade still used it from time to time. From the sound of it, Cade needed it today.

  Shane gave up calling to Cade and climbed the stairs.

  Cade’s face was blank as he threw punch after punch. Shane shut the music off but Cade didn’t stop for a few minutes. When he finally did, his shirt was drenched through with sweat. He walked over to one wall and slumped down, resting his arms on raised knees and letting his head fall back to the wall.

  Shane grabbed a bottle of water and put it by Cade’s side and then sat against the wall, legs kicked out in front of him…and waited. There wasn’t anything to do but wait. Cade may have been the more even-keeled of the brothers, but when he did blow, he blew hard, and Shane had learned you just had to wait for Cade to calm down before you talked to him. When Cade was ready, he’d tell Shane what happened.

  Cade pulled the gloves from his hands and unpeeled the tape from around his knuckles before he finally spoke. “Mom got Laura to talk. They didn’t know I was in the house. They don’t know I heard the whole thing.”

  Shane didn’t say anything. He and Cade had both known whatever story Laura had to tell would be a bad one. He didn’t know if he really wanted to hear what Cade had overheard. He was pretty sure he didn’t. Cade had seen and heard a lot of things because of the work he did with animals. For something to hit him this hard, it had to be bad.

  “After her dad spent a lifetime treating her like crap, she meets this guy she thinks is Mr. Wonderful. He’s all respectful and careful with her, and she thinks he’s the one who’s gonna save her from her father. She thinks he’ll take her away and treat her right, that he’ll cherish her. He didn’t even try to get in her pants before the wedding. So even though her dad says he’ll disown her if she marries Patrick, she does.”

  Cade swallowed down the rest of the water in two large gulps. “You want to know why he never tried to touch her before they got married?”

  Shane didn’t answer. He didn’t want to know. But he couldn’t get the word “no” out. The pain etched on Cade’s face had Shane frozen in place. He tried to swallow the painful lump in his throat and get something out. Anything that would stop what was coming, but he couldn’t.

  “You know why? Because he couldn’t get it up if he wasn’t hitting her. She didn’t say it quite like that. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s what it came down to. She was a virgin, and her husband raped her because that was the only way he could perform. So, she thought something was wrong with her. Can you imagine? She thought it was her fault. She said she didn’t, but I could tell she did. Could hear the truth of it in her voice.” Cade buried his head in his arms again and Shane wanted to do the same thing.

  Laura was so tiny, so fragile looking. He couldn’t imagine what it would do to her to have a grown man beating on her. Just picturing it made Shane feel as sick as Cade looked.

  “You wanna know the first time he beat her so badly she couldn’t leave the house for a week?” Cade asked.

  “No,” Shane managed to say this time, but Cade wasn’t listening. He was staring at the wall like he was seeing the story he was telling, and he was too trapped by the power of it to see what was around him or hear Shane’s voice.

  “When her brother died. She wanted to go home to the funeral, but her husband had a business dinner she needed to attend. She had the nerve to ask him to postpone it so she could fly home for her brother’s funeral. The irony was, she couldn’t go to the dinner with him anyway. After the beating he gave her, she couldn’t be seen in public for over a week, so she missed the flipping dinner anyway.”

  The brothers sat together without speaking for a long time. There was nothing to say. Shane couldn’t imagine the fear Laura must have been living with every single day, the threat of having the person you thought you loved and could trust turn on you like that.

  “I wish he wasn’t dead,” Cade said. Shane didn’t have to ask why. He was thinking the same thing. If her husband wasn’t dead, they could hunt him down and have the satisfaction of teaching him what it was like to be hit by someone so much stronger than yourself—to live in constant fear.

  “Do you think his family knew? She said they lived right near them and saw his fa
mily every weekend. Do you think they knew?” Shane asked.

  Cade nodded. “I don’t see how they couldn’t know.”

  They sat quietly brooding for a minute before Cade went on. “No wonder she ran. Even though he’s dead, they can’t get this baby. We can’t let that family get this baby, Shane.”

  “I know. I’ve already started looking into the legalities of it. In a fair fight in court, they’d have very little chance of getting the baby, but it’s likely she’ll have to allow them visitation. Of course, with the Kensington family, who knows if the fight will be fair? I think when they put out the news that she was mentally unstable, they were already gearing up for a custody hearing. I think they’ll try to show she’s an unfit mother,” Shane said.

  “Then we need to help her make sure she’s on her feet and providing for the baby when they find her. We need to make sure she has a shot at this,” Cade said, pulling himself up and going to the fridge. He pulled out a beer and tossed it to Shane before pulling out one for himself and an icepack for his knuckles.

  “Are you gonna tell her how you feel about her?” Shane asked, causing Cade to freeze, bottle halfway to his lips.

  Cade eyed him and took the sip he’d postponed. “Heck no. Another man is the last thing she needs in her life right now.”

  “You’re nothing like her father or her husband.”

  Cade didn’t budge. “Doesn’t matter. That’s not what she wants or needs now. And, it’s not what I need. I don’t need another woman who—”

  “Who what, might have to lean on you from time to time? Who might not always be strong on her own?”

  Cade glared but didn’t answer.

  “Don’t let Lacey do that to you. What she put on you isn’t fair and you know it. It isn’t your fault she tried to kill herself. She would have done that whether you broke up with her or not. She was sick and she needed help and you know it. Letting her put that on you is just you being a damn martyr,” Shane said. He was tired of watching Cade’s ex-girlfriend drag him down over and over again.