by LENA DIAZ,
Her gaze went to the windows. “I must really be tired. I hadn’t even noticed.”
“Even if it weren’t storming, I’d strongly suggest that you consider staying. Whoever is after you knows about your mom’s house. I can protect you here, if it comes to that.”
She ran her hands up and down her arms and nodded. “Makes sense. Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“No trouble at all. The guest room’s the first one down the hall on the left. There are toothbrushes, shampoo, everything you need in there. Oh, except something to sleep in. My room is right next door. You’re welcome to grab one of my T-shirts to sleep in if you want.”
“Sounds good.” She grabbed her purse from one of the end tables and started toward the hallway, then stopped. “Max?”
He’d just rounded the island going into the kitchen but waited and raised a questioning brow.
“Thank you,” she said. “For everything. I know we haven’t figured out how to clear my name yet. But for the first time in, well, forever, I feel like there’s hope. So, thanks.”
“You can always count on me, Bex. I’m always here for you. No matter what.” Sappy, but true. No sense in denying it.
Her eyes widened, and then she whirled around and disappeared down the hall.
Max let out a deep breath and headed into the kitchen. They’d talked right through dinner and his stomach was rumbling. He grabbed a handful of grapes from the refrigerator and leaned against the counter, popping them into his mouth and chasing them with a bottle of water. When he finished his snack, he headed into the main room to kill the lights.
Was Bex asleep already? Probably. She’d seemed so worn out. He couldn’t help smiling, thinking about her lying in the middle of the bed, wearing one of his T-shirts. He froze in the middle of the room, his smile fading. His T-shirts. He’d told her to grab one. He kept them in his top dresser drawer.
But that wasn’t all he kept in that drawer.
He swore and flipped off the main light then hurried down the hallway. The light was on in the master bedroom, streaming into the hall. Hurry. Stop her. He bolted to the doorway then froze. Bex was standing in front of the dresser, her hair freshly brushed, but still wearing her jeans and blouse. One of his T-shirts dangled from her left hand. Maybe he’d caught her in time.
Her eyes slowly rose to his, and then she held up her other hand, the one holding a diamond solitaire ring.
* * *
BEX’S WHOLE BODY shook as she held the same ring that Max had offered her so long ago. There was no mistaking it. Every facet had been branded into her memory. It was definitely the same ring.
“Why?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “Why did you keep it?”
His jaw tightened and he crossed the room to her, swiping the ring from her palm and grabbing the little black box from the drawer full of T-shirts. “No reason, just never got around to returning it.” He shoved the ring back in its velvet bed and popped the lid shut.
“It had to have cost a small fortune. You probably made payments on it for years,” she said. “You couldn’t have forgotten it.”
His expression was shuttered, remote, as he faced her. “I believe that you have everything you need in the guest room. Have a good night’s sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Oh, Max. What have I done?” she whispered. Hot tears traced down her cheeks.
He let out an impatient breath and strode to the door, holding it open. “Good night, Bex.”
Like two duelers at ten paces, they faced each other—her with his T-shirt clutched in her hand, him with the promise of forever in his. A promise he’d once offered out of love and she’d refused, also out of love. But he didn’t understand that. She’d never explained any of that to him. And seeing the ring in his drawer had shocked her to the core, and made her realize for the first time that maybe she’d been wrong. She’d made a decision to protect him. But she’d also shut him out, never explained her reasons, and left him in a state of limbo, always wondering why.
This amazing man in front of her deserved so much better than that. She wasn’t the girl she’d been back then. She was a grown woman. And it was high time she came clean about everything, not just the horrible events around Bobby’s death. She needed to explain to Max why she’d told him no.
She slowly padded toward him in her bare feet and lifted his hand away from the door.
He frowned down at her, obviously not sure what she was doing. She smiled sadly and pushed the door closed.
A wary look came over him. “Bex, what are you—”
She pressed her fingers against his lips, startling him into silence. “I owe you an explanation, for this.”
She tried to take the velvet box, but he pulled it back, a gentle tug-of-war.
“Please,” she said. “I don’t deserve your trust, but I’m asking for it. Trust me. I’ll just put this back in the drawer.”
Without a word, his back so stiff he could have been a soldier submitting to inspection, he relinquished his hold on the box.
Unable to resist another look, Bex opened the lid and turned it, watching the solitaire twinkle beneath the overhead light.
“Bex—”
“I know, I know. Sorry. It’s just so beautiful.” She slowly closed the lid and replaced the box in the drawer. After tossing the T-shirt onto the king-size four-poster bed, she crossed to Max again and took his reluctant hand in hers. “Can we sit down, just for a few minutes? I need to tell you what I should have told you years ago.”
The struggle inside him was evident in the expressions on his face. Unlike a lot of tough guys, Max didn’t do stoic very well. He was tough, yet sensitive, always caring. It was one of the things she’d always admired about him, one of the reasons she’d known he’d be an excellent cop—because he cared.
Although the master bedroom was large, it was neat and sparse, like the rest of the house. There was only one chair, on the right side of the bed. So she tugged his hand, urging him toward the bed with her. She let his hand go and had to climb up on the blasted thing, it was so high. Then she turned around and patted the spot beside her.
He looked like he was trying not to laugh, and finally gave in to a grin. “You look like Tinker Bell climbing up on that bed.”
She shook her head. “I never did understand your fascination with fairies.”
“Not with fairies. Just you.” His smile dimmed and he sat beside her. “Whatever you think you need to say, you don’t. I don’t have any expectations of us getting back together. There’s no reason for you to feel uncomfortable or worry that I’m going to hit on you.”
“You kissed me in the family room.”
“Momentary insanity. I recovered. It won’t happen again.”
She looked down at her hands, trying not to let him see that his words had struck their target. Her heart. She braced herself and forced herself to look up, not to cower and not to run again when the going got tough.
“It’s time I faced my past,” she said. “I’ve already told you about the night of my birthday in regards to Bobby Caldwell. But I didn’t tell you everything, not the part about us.”
He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “You don’t have to do this, Bex. It really doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It does matter. I hurt you, and that was never my intention, in spite of how it must have seemed. All I ask is that you listen. It won’t take long. I just want to explain why I said no.”
He shrugged as if he didn’t care. But his gaze was riveted on her and he didn’t protest anymore.
“You’d been hinting about that night for a while, talking about how special it would be, how important it was. It didn’t take a genius to figure out you were probably going to propose. We’d certainly talked about the possibility of spending the rest of ou
r lives together often enough. I think we both always assumed we’d end up together. I certainly thought I’d be your wife one day, that we’d build a life together, create our own little family.”
His breathing hitched, but he didn’t move, just kept watching her.
“I don’t know if you remember, but Chief Thornton had come to the school earlier that week for one of his career day speeches. And just like every year before, you hung on his every word. And after it was over, you talked about your big dream, of being a police officer here in Destiny, of being a detective and working your way onto the SWAT team. It’s the only dream you ever really wanted.”
His jaw tightened, but again he said nothing.
She sighed. “Anyway, I knew how important that was to you. And I also knew that if that dream was ever taken away, it would utterly destroy you.” She twisted her hands in her lap. “You’d already gotten in trouble fighting Bobby many times to try to protect me. That was okay while you were still a minor. But you turned eighteen two weeks before I did. If you fought Bobby again, you could have been charged as an adult. And that would have given you a criminal record. I couldn’t let that happen.”
He frowned. “Bex—”
“Wait. Let me finish. There’s more to it than that. I was afraid for your life. The situation with Bobby kept getting worse, and I didn’t know what was going to happen or what to do. All I knew for sure was that Bobby was winning the war. And he was evil and told me many times that if he couldn’t have me no one would. If I had married you, Bobby would have killed you. I know it. I couldn’t live knowing that I had caused your death.”
He stared at her incredulously. “You told me no because you thought I couldn’t protect myself?”
“What? No, I mean, yes. But you make it sound so simple. It wasn’t. I truly thought Bobby would kill you if I didn’t end things between us.”
Tears splashed down her cheeks onto her hands. She impatiently wiped them away. “But even if I was wrong, if Bobby tried to hurt you and you ended up killing him instead, that would have destroyed you just as completely. Because it could have destroyed your dream of becoming a police officer. What if you were convicted of manslaughter or something like that? Thornton wouldn’t have allowed you on the police force with a record. I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t live with myself knowing you’d grow to hate me a little bit every day we were together, realizing that I was the reason you’d given up what you truly loved.”
His hand firmly tilted her chin up so she’d look at him. The anger that flashed in his eyes startled her.
“Are you saying you turned down my proposal to protect me? Either from Bobby or from myself?”
She tried to nod, but couldn’t, so she whispered, “Yes.”
He swore and stood up, his boots ringing against the floor as he paced in front of the bed like a caged tiger. “All this time, I thought maybe you’d played me. That you didn’t really love me.”
She blinked in shock. “I’ve always loved you.”
“Funny way of showing it.”
“I know. I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you.”
He stopped pacing in front of her. “You may have loved me, but you sure as hell didn’t know me.”
“Excuse me?”
He braced his hands on the bed on either side of her. “Do you honestly think that being a cop was my biggest dream? That what I truly loved, more than anything else, was the idea of being a detective and a SWAT officer? Sure, I wanted to be a cop. And I wanted to stay in my hometown to do it. But a career wasn’t the love of my life. You were. I’d have given everything I had for you and never regretted it for a single second. Ten years, Bex. For ten years I’ve been asking myself what I did wrong, what was there about me that made me unworthy of you. I couldn’t figure it out. I thought, maybe, one day, if you ever came back, you’d tell me about this horrible thing that I’d done to you and it would make the lightbulb click in my mind. I’d be like, oh, wow, that’s what I did. And then I’d apologize and do everything I could to make it right. But I didn’t do anything wrong.”
He thumped his chest. “I did everything I could for you, loved you with every ounce of my being. And you didn’t love me enough to even have a freaking conversation over your fears so we could work through it. You know what, Bexley? If you’d just asked me what I wanted, I’d have told you that we could move away somewhere, start over in another town. I’d have gone anywhere, done anything and been happy, as long as I was with you. Instead, you didn’t trust me, or love me enough to give me a chance. You didn’t give me my dream by leaving me. You stole my dream, Bex. Because being a cop wasn’t my dream. Being with you was.”
He whirled around and strode out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
Chapter Nineteen
Bex’s mouth fell open, Max’s angry words repeating themselves in her mind as the sound of his boots rang through the house. Wind suddenly howled outside the bedroom door, followed by a metallic thump. He’d gone outside, in the middle of a lightning storm. Because of her.
Oh, God, what had she done?
She shoved off the bed, hopping down to the floor just as the lights flickered and went out. Letting her memory of the house’s layout guide her, she flung the door open and ran down the hall into the main room. She froze at a loud pinging sound against the glass.
“It’s just the storm.” Max’s deep voice spoke from the dark. “It’s finally raining. The wind is driving it in sheets against the back of the house.”
She turned toward his voice, but the room was too dark to make out anything but silhouettes. He was standing by the fireplace, one of his booted feet resting on the raised hearth, a hand braced against the mantel.
She turned, looking for one of the lamps she’d seen earlier.
“Don’t bother.” He spoke from the gloom again, his voice already drained of anger, sounding flat, emotionless. “The power just went out.”
She started toward him, then let out a curse when her shin banged the coffee table.
“Wait there,” he said.
He bent down, but she couldn’t tell what he was doing. Light flared, like from a long match. Then a small fire began to grow in the fireplace. He must have had it set up with kindling and logs, ready to go, because it quickly caught and grew into a roaring fire. The flames threw a flickering, eerie light across his features and through the room.
He turned his back on her. “Go to sleep, Bex. The house is sturdy. You don’t need to be afraid of the storm.”
The coward inside her, the one who’d never picked up the phone or tried to talk to him for all those years, urged her to do as he said. But coming back to Destiny had changed her irrevocably, had reawakened feelings long ago buried, had made her realize just how her actions had impacted those around her. Running away, going back home without making things right, wasn’t something she could do now. She had to face what she’d done. All of it. And that meant facing Max one more time.
She circled the coffee table and crossed the room to stand directly behind him.
“Max, you didn’t let me finish explaining why I told you no.”
He sighed wearily. “I’ve heard enough.”
“Maybe you have. But there’s one more thing I have to tell you. It might not matter to you. But it matters to me. I realize how much I’ve hurt people by leaving when I did, by running away. And I’m trying to make it right the only way I know how, by telling the truth. There might not be any proof of what really happened that night with Bobby. But when this storm is over and the sun comes up, I’m going to call the chief and tell him to come get me so I can give a full statement. Because it’s not just about me. It’s about Bobby’s father, and his brother. They deserve to know what I know. Someone killed their loved one that night, and they need to know my role in it, if nothing else, so they can expend
their energy looking for the right killer.”
He turned his head, hand braced on the mantel, boot still resting on the hearth. But at least he was listening.
“I already explained why I turned down your proposal,” she continued. “But I didn’t explain why I left. Bobby was dead. So there wasn’t any worry by then that you’d get in trouble fighting or going after him.”
He frowned. “I wondered at that, after I left the bedroom.”
The fact that he was at least talking with her now gave her hope. She plodded forward. “I left because I thought I’d killed Bobby. I’ve thought that all this time, until you proved to me today that I didn’t kill him. I left because I knew that if I stayed in town, you would do everything you could to help me. And I wouldn’t be strong enough to resist you for very long. I talked it through with Mama and we both agreed, the only way to protect you was for me to leave.”
He shook his head in disgust. “There you go talking about protecting me again. Don’t you realize that’s my job? To protect you?” He looked back toward the fireplace. “Or it would have been. If you’d stayed.”
“Exactly.”
He frowned and looked at her again.
“That’s my point,” she said. “You would have felt it was your duty to protect me, even after I’d turned you down. Because that’s how you are, a wonderful, good, loyal, kind man who would protect the woman he loved even if she was a murderer. Even if it cost him his career.”
He swore again. “We’re right back where we started. Bex, you’re way more important to me than any job. Don’t you get that?”
“Actually, yeah, I do. Now. You’ve ignored your boss’s calls all day and risked everything to be here with me, to keep me from confessing back in town. You’re doing exactly what I tried to prevent by running away in the first place.”
He shook his head.
She stepped closer, placing her hand on his chest, feeling his muscles bunch beneath her fingertips. “But I’m not running this time. I’m not going anywhere. I love you, Max. And we’re both adults now. I don’t know if you can ever forgive me for not trusting you and giving you the chance to make your own decisions about your future all those years ago. But I’m hoping you can at least try.”
