Chaps and Chance

by Evans, Jessie

  But he didn’t like the idea of leaving Layla vulnerable in the meantime.

  So when he saw her heading for the exit with one of her girlfriends a few minutes later, he hopped off of his stool and crossed the room, catching her at the door and pressing a napkin with his cell number written on it into her hand.

  “My number. Just in case,” he said. “I know Grayson has it, but I wanted to make sure you did, too. And seriously, don’t hesitate to call if you need back up. Better safe than sorry.”

  “Thank you.” Her fingertips brushed lightly against his palm as she took the napkin, even that innocent touch enough to make his pulse spike. “But I don’t think I’ll need it. Things have been quiet.”

  “Too quiet,” the petite Asian girl with the nose piercing glinting from her left nostril grumbled as she shifted her gaze from Layla to Cole. “I don’t know why she’s leaving with me, by the way. We told her to pounce your bones. So you can rest assured that there was no cock-blocking on our end.”

  “Yasmin, behave,” Layla hissed, pink spreading across the bridge of her nose.

  “But behaving is no fun.” Yasmin grinned, clearly enjoying Layla’s embarrassment, as she winked at Cole. “See you around, hot stuff. I might be breaking up with my boyfriend this weekend. If I do, I’ll be back here next Friday to hunt you down.”

  “Oh, um…” Cole blinked, thrown by a woman’s advances for the first time in his life. He’d been so focused on Layla that he was unprepared to be hit on, and despite Yasmin’s cute face and banging body, he was completely uninterested.

  When Layla was in a room, he’d never been tempted to look at any woman but her.

  “Aw, look, now he’s blushing.” Yasmin giggled madly. “You two are so cute! You should totally go home and bang like bunnies all night long. It’s your destiny. Your duty as red-blooded American citizens.”

  “Oh, hush.” The red staining Layla’s cheeks crept toward her hairline.

  “Do it for America!” the other woman continued, lifting a clenched hand into the air. “For Texas! For the children!”

  “Outside.” Layla pointed a firm finger toward the door. “Now.”

  “But think of the children!” Yasmin was still giggling as Layla opened the door and waved her through. “Why won’t anyone think of the children?”

  Layla glanced back at him with a shake of her head. “I’m sorry. Please forgive her. She’s had three too many margaritas.”

  Cole grinned. “No forgiveness needed. I just hope you’re driving her home.”

  “Absolutely,” Layla said, returning his smile. “Thanks again for the number. It was good seeing you.”

  “You too,” he said as she slipped through the heavy wooden door and out into the warm spring night.

  Cole returned to his table, hoping he would see Layla soon, glad that he’d made sure she had his phone number. He realized the chances of her calling were slim, but it made him feel better to know she could reach him if she needed to.

  He never expected to be woken at two a.m. that very night by the trill of his cell phone or to look down at the screen to see an unfamiliar local number glowing in the darkness of his bedroom.

  He never expected to answer the call with a sleepy “hello?” or to hear Layla’s voice whisper from the other end of the line—

  “Cole, it’s Layla. I’m alone and there’s someone in the house.”

  “Call 911,” he said, already out of bed and reaching for the jeans he’d flung over the back of his desk chair. “I’m coming, but they’ll get there sooner.”

  “I tried,” she said, sounding like she was choking on the words, her terror so thick he could feel it pouring through the line. “But all the circuits are busy. I can’t get through and I left my shotgun downstairs.”

  “It’s going to be okay, I’m on my way.”

  “Please hurry,” she said, voice trembling. “I’m so scared. I should never have stopped being scared.”

  “I’ll break every speed limit on the way there,” he promised, running for the door. “Find somewhere to hide and stay quiet.”

  “Okay,” she said in a panicked whisper. “Please be careful. Don’t get hurt. I couldn’t live with myself if you got hurt.”

  “I won’t.” Cole stopped to grab his shotgun from the case in the living room. “Hide and stay quiet. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  Cole hung up and slipped his phone into his pocket, freeing his hands to work the combination lock on the gun cabinet. He grabbed his gun and ammo, shoved his sockless feet into the work boots sitting by the door, and was in his truck heading toward the front gate of his family’s ranch a few minutes later.

  He made good time through the utter blackness of the country roads between his ranch and Layla’s, but every minute seemed to stretch on for panic-laced hours.

  What if he didn’t get there in time? What if whoever had broken in to the Parker house hurt Layla? Maybe even killed her? What would he do if he found the person responsible standing over his friend’s lifeless body?

  A few months ago, Cole had been one of the naïve people who believed Lonesome Point was one of the safest places in the world. But there was nothing special about his sleepy hometown; no small town magic keeping the people he cared about safe. Yes, everyone in Lonesome Point knew almost everything about everyone else, but sometimes familiarity bred contempt.

  Sometimes living small, living close, drove sane people to do insane things. Like when the Gibleys poisoned their neighbor’s dogs, or when Janice Street snuck into her husband’s mistress’s house and cut off the other woman’s hair while she slept.

  And sometimes living so close made people feel compelled to keep secrets, to hide their suffering to avoid living the rest of their lives defined by the crimes perpetrated against them. Tawny Webb would always be “the girl who was raped after the Homecoming dance” and Vic Hutchins would always be “the man who was robbed and nearly beaten to death outside the casino.” Nothing those people would ever do, no matter how bright or wonderful, would ever eclipse the shadow cast by the acts of brutality they’d survived.

  Brutality that, in a town as small as Lonesome Point, would forever define them.

  Cole could understand why Layla hadn’t wanted to be “the golden girl whose perfect marriage had gone horribly wrong,” but he wished she’d gone to the police sooner. Maybe she could have gotten a restraining order or convinced the chief of police to have a cruiser drive by her place on its nightly patrol.

  Like that would make a difference to a man who’d terrorized the woman he’d promised to love and protect.

  “You’d better be gone, Wayne,” Cole murmured as he cut the lights a good fifty feet from the entrance to the Parker ranch and pulled to the side of the road. “Because if you’re not, I’m going to make you wish you were.”

  There were times when it was better not to give a fuck and move on, but there were times when you had to fight back. The moment Wayne had gone from an asshole sitting alone in his house to an asshole breaking into Layla’s, he’d made this a fighting situation.

  Now Cole just had to hope he got to Layla in time to keep her safe.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Layla

  Quiet. Calm. Don’t breathe. Don’t think. Don’t move. Play dead, Layla. You can do that.

  You’ve been half-dead for years.

  Layla squeezed her eyes shut and curled into a tighter ball inside the absolute blackness of the storage ottoman in the corner of Grayson and Reece’s bedroom. She’d dismissed the closet and underneath the bed as too predictable to be good hiding places. At the last moment, just as footsteps plodded slowly up the stairs, she’d lowered herself into the hollow ottoman and pulled the heavy leather lid on top.

  Now, there was nothing but to keep quiet and pray.

  Pray that it wasn’t Wayne’s boots thumping on the wooden floor in the hall, pray that this was a thief who would take her valuables and go away, and pray that Cole didn’t get hurt when he came
rushing to her rescue.

  She should never have called him. She shouldn’t have put him in danger, no matter how terrified she was.

  Please, God, please let Cole be okay. Please let this be anyone other than Wayne.

  A moment later, her husband’s deep voice shattered the middle-of-the-night silence, proving no one was listening to her prayers. “I know you’re here, Layla. And I know your brother isn’t. So why don’t you come out and talk to me, baby girl. I think we’ve got a lot to go over, don’t you?”

  Layla bit down hard on her bottom lip, concentrating on the pain, fighting the tremor that rocked through her body in response to hearing her husband’s voice for the first time in months. She’d started to forget how easily he could frighten her, the way all it took was a few words and a certain tone of voice to let her know she was in trouble.

  That tone thickened his words as he spoke again, making it clear how much he itched to get his hands on her, his fists into her, his rage washing over her like a flood of poison she couldn’t escape.

  “I know what you did, baby.” Wayne’s words were followed by a low laugh that transformed into a prolonged, racking cough.

  It was the cough he’d had for months now, the one he couldn’t seem to shake. Layla had suffered from it too, for a while. Long enough to throw off suspicion, but not long enough for Wayne to give in to his mother’s insistence that they hire a mold specialist to come check out the house.

  Wayne didn’t like people in the house—not repairmen or deliverymen, not even his parents and brothers. He didn’t want people to see the holes in the plaster made by his fists and Layla’s head the two times he’d slammed her skull into the wall. He didn’t want people to see how books, magazines, and movies had begun to mound up in towering piles all over the house, evidence to the way Layla passed the time when her online work for Wheeler Meat Solutions was done for the day. She was quick with her duties, which left lots of time to kill.

  In the early days, she’d gone out to help Wayne with his ranching work in the afternoons, but as their marriage deteriorated and the days that her body was sufficiently bruise-free to venture outside grew fewer, she’d lost her hunger for physical work and sunlight on her skin. Her world had become a dark place, no matter how brightly the sun was shining, and her greatest relief was escaping into a good book and living someone else’s life for a while.

  Wayne had hated her piles and the dust she allowed to collect on the furniture while she read. He called her lazy for neglecting the housework and getting so sucked into a story that she often forgot to start dinner until he walked in the door at six thirty, tired and hungry.

  He didn’t understand why she no longer cared about keeping things pin-straight or cooking elaborate meals for them to share, the way she had when they were first married. No matter how bad things got, Wayne never seemed to realize that Layla had become as sad and hopeless as she knew he felt a lot of the time. He was so wrapped up in his own ups and downs he didn’t notice his wife wasn’t the happy, upbeat person she’d once been.

  He didn’t notice a lot of things…

  “Come out, Layla,” he called, voice rough from his coughing fit. “I’m going to find you, even if I have to tear this entire house apart. It’ll go better for you if you come out and start packing right now.”

  Packing? He couldn’t want her to go home with him. He couldn’t, not if he knew what she’d done.

  If he really knew, he’d—

  “I’ve got the sheets washed and everything,” Wayne continued, interrupting her panicked thoughts. “We can go home and fuck the way we used to before you became a murdering bitch, get a good night’s sleep, and get up in the morning ready to make this better.”

  Oh God. He knew.

  He knew.

  “I know you want to make this better, Layla.” The heavy footsteps moved closer, vibrating the floor beneath the ottoman. “This isn’t like you, baby.”

  Layla bit her lip harder and kept her eyes shut, wishing she could shut off her hearing as easily. She didn’t want to listen to him anymore, didn’t want to believe that her plan had backfired.

  She’d assumed Wayne would go to the police if he found out what she’d done and had taken the necessary steps to protect herself from being charged with a crime. She had been prepared to face police questioning—or Wayne trying to kill her if he decided to bypass the middleman and deliver the death penalty himself—she had never imagined that he’d want her back.

  But she should have. She should have realized that Wayne enjoyed making up as much as breaking her down.

  In the very early days, a twisted part of her had enjoyed it, too. Things she had begun to take for granted seemed so much more precious and intimate in the wake of the abuse. The way Wayne held her more carefully, made love to her with more passion, and seemed so much more grateful for what they had than before he’d hit her or shoved her down the steps had made it easy to make excuses to stay.

  “Laaaayla,” he said, drawing out her name in a sing-song voice that was way too close for comfort. “Last chance, doll face, and then I start looking and you aren’t going to be happy when I find you.”

  It took every ounce of willpower inside of her to stay curled in the ottoman, to ignore the hysterical voice in her head that said Wayne knew where she was and her only hope was to run for it and hope she could run faster than he could. He didn’t know. He couldn’t. The ottoman didn’t look big enough to fit a grown woman. This wasn’t the first place he’d look.

  He’d start with the closets and move on from there. Maybe he’d even start in another room and she’d be able to slip out of the ottoman and escape through the window. Maybe she could find Cole before he reached the house and get them both to safety before this got any worse.

  “All right, then,” Wayne said. “Just remember that you asked for this, baby. You’re giving me no choice.”

  A moment later the ottoman’s lid began to move. She gulped, her nerve endings flaring white hot with terror until it felt like a thousand tiny fires were being lit across the surface of her skin.

  “I could smell your shampoo, bitch.” Wayne tossed the lid to the floor. “How stupid do you think I am?”

  She looked up to see Wayne leering down at her in the pale light sifting into the room from the hallway and screamed. She screamed and screamed and then his hand was in her hair, wrenching her from her hiding place and strands from her scalp, giving her something to scream about.

  Giving her a reason to cry and beg for mercy.

  She knew whatever was coming next was going to hurt more than she’d ever hurt before, and it wasn’t going to end in anything as peaceful as her death. Wayne had been telling the truth a year ago when he’d sworn he didn’t want her dead.

  He didn’t want her to pass into a world where he had no power over her; he wanted to hold her captive in hell.

  “No!” She screamed, voice rising hysterically as he dragged her across the room and threw her on Grayson’s bed. “This is my house, this is my house! You can’t do this in my house!”

  She was screaming so loudly she didn’t hear Cole’s footsteps on the stairs or realize he was in the room until the sound of a shotgun cocking filled the air and Cole shouted—

  “Get away from her Wayne. Now! I’m not going to ask twice.”

  Wayne’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t look at Cole or break eye contact with Layla. He simply pointed a finger in her face and whispered, “Come home. Come home by this time next week, or this entire town is going to be sorry you didn’t.”

  And then he turned and walked toward Cole without slowing his pace as if he couldn’t care less that there was a gun trained on his chest. But Wayne was never afraid. He inspired fear; he didn’t suffer from it.

  When he reached the other man, he paused long enough to look Cole up and down and laugh—a low, ugly laugh that made the hair rise on Layla’s arms—before continuing out the door and down the stairs. Layla stayed frozen, huddled in the mid
dle of the bed until she heard the front door shut.

  Only then did she collapse onto the quilt, curling into a ball on her side, tucking her chin to her chest and her forehead to her knees, fighting to bring her labored breath back under control.

  “I’ll be right back, Layla,” Cole said in a careful voice as if he was afraid speaking too loudly might cause her to shatter. “I’m going to make sure he leaves.”

  She heard his footsteps walking away down the hall and then walking back again, but she still flinched when he spoke from the end of the bed.

  “He’s gone. I saw his truck start toward the gate.” He paused and a moment later the mattress dipped on the right side. “I’m not going to ask if you’re okay because obviously you aren’t. But I will ask if it’s okay for me to hold you.”

  Layla’s breath rushed raggedly between her lips. “Yes,” she whispered, her skin prickling all over as Cole lay down behind her and curled his big warm body around hers.

  His arm gently wrapped around her waist and his breath heated the skin at her neck and slowly, slowly her whip-tight muscles began to relax. Her chest loosened as she matched the rhythm of her breath to his, drawing in long, even sips of air until there was space in her mind for something other than the buzz of terror.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry I put you in danger, but thank you for coming.”

  “Quit apologizing. You have nothing to be sorry for. I’m just glad I got here in time.” He sighed against her neck, his arm tightening around her waist. “What the fuck happened to him, Layla? He doesn’t look like the same man. When he threw you on the bed… His face… It was like—”

  “A monster,” Layla whispered. “Like there’s a monster inside of him.”