Still, if he kept touching her, he was going to get her into that car and take her into Foley to the fricking hospital. “I’m fine . . . Hey, what’s your name?” Taige really wanted to know, because she had a feeling she was going to spend a lot of time daydreaming about him.
“Cullen. Yours?”
“It’s Taige. Cullen, I appreciate the help, but I am fine. I just want to go to bed.”
“I bet you do,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Taige, you aren’t fine. Where’s the hospital?” He tugged on her arm again, and Taige didn’t feel steady enough to fight him, so she fell into step beside him. He led her to a rusted-out, patched-up vintage Mustang, and Taige had to smile.
It was parked in the middle of Porsches, BMWs, and Volvos, all of them gleaming and polished and perfect. His car looked like a mutt sitting in the middle of a pedigree dog show. “Nice car,” she murmured.
He slid her a narrow look as though he knew exactly what she was thinking. But he didn’t say a word about the car. Cullen cocked a brow at her and repeated, “Hospital?”
She folded her arms across her chest and shook her head. “No. I’m not going to no damn hospital.”
“You can’t just go home.”
She didn’t have any intention of going home, either, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. Her knees buckled, and she knew she had to sit down. “Look, how about you take me to a friend’s house? Her son is an EMT. He can look me over, and if he thinks I ought to go to the hospital, I’ll go.”
But Dante wouldn’t insist on that, not unless she was in serious need of a doctor, and she knew she wasn’t. He could check her over, and Rose could fuss over her, and she’d be fine.
Cullen stared at her as though he seemed to realize just how unsteady she felt, and he guided her around the car so that she could lean against his rusted-out Mustang. It was mottled between some indeterminate shade of blue, that ugly primer gray, and rust. But it could have been covered with slime, and she wouldn’t care. It took some of her weight, and she finally stopped feeling like she might hit the ground.
“What about your folks?” he asked softly. “They’ll be scared. Won’t they want you to get looked over?”
She looked away. “My parents are dead. I live with an uncle and he—” She just barely managed to stop herself from saying, If those boys had killed me, Leon would have offered up his praise to God. She finally forced herself to say, “He won’t care. Look, just take me to my friends. I feel like hell.”
THE door opened to reveal a skinny black lady. The top of her head might have barely reached Cullen’s shoulder. The guy behind her looked like a damned giant. He probably stood a good head taller than Cullen, and he probably weighed the same as Cullen and the lady together. Cullen topped out right at six feet, but he felt like a midget standing there. The man’s eyes narrowed on Taige’s battered, bruised face, and then they slid up to Cullen’s, like he was imagining how Cullen would look after a close encounter or ten with a big, blunt object.
The woman, though, was focused on Taige. “Oh, baby,” she murmured, reaching out to touch Taige’s face. She immediately stepped aside and shoved on the big guy’s chest until he did the same. “Out of the way, Dante. Go get me the first aid kit.”
Dante—great name, Cullen thought. He could see hell burning in the big guy’s eyes, and even though he hadn’t done a damn thing, he wasn’t all that happy to be standing in front of the man. Dante didn’t move, and the woman spun around and slammed the heel of her hand into his chest. “Boy, I told you to get out of the way. Come on, now, honey, let’s look at you.”
Taige gave the woman a wan smile. “I’m okay, Rose. I just need to get some rest.”
“Okay,” Rose muttered. She shook her head and then repeated it again, like she couldn’t quite believe what Taige had said. “You’re okay?”
Cullen said, “I tried to get her to let me take her to the hospital, but she wouldn’t go. Said somebody here’s a paramedic . . . ?”
Rose jerked her chin toward the man who still hulked in the shadows like he was ready to rip Cullen’s arm off and beat him to death with it. “Yeah. My boy, Dante, does emergency rescues. He can look her over well enough—if he’d get his butt moving.”
Dante’s lip curled in a snarl, and without saying a word, he turned and stomped off down a dark hallway. The woman reached up and patted Cullen’s arm. “Don’t you worry about him. He’s just protective of Taige. We both are.”
Rose shouldered Cullen aside, tucking her small body up against Taige’s and leading her through an arched doorway. “Get that light on the wall for me—what’s your name?”
“It’s Cullen.”
“Get the light on for me, Cullen, and then you sit right down there and tell me what happened.” She eased Taige’s body onto the couch and gave her the same look Cullen had gotten from his mother a time or two before. “Because I know this girl, and she ain’t going to tell me a damn thing.”
Dante slid into the room, moving quieter than a man that big ought to be able to move. In his arms he held a box that looked more like a tackle box than any first aid kit Cullen had ever seen. But he didn’t turn it over to his mother; instead, he crouched down by Taige’s head and started looking her over. Cullen knew the man was listening to every word Cullen said, but Dante didn’t say anything until Cullen had finished speaking. “You should have taken her on into the emergency room, no matter what she said,” Dante said. He had a deep, gruff voice, and when he glanced at Cullen over a big shoulder, Cullen saw the fury simmering there.
Fortunately, it didn’t seem like it was directed at Cullen now, and he breathed a little easier. “I tried to. But I don’t know where it is, and she wasn’t too interested in telling me. She said she’d have you look her over, and if you insisted, she’d go.”
That made Dante laugh. Then he looked at Taige, shaking his head. “Yeah, like she’s ever done a damn thing just cuz I told her she ought to.” Dante sighed and opened the box at his side. “Let’s get you cleaned up. And Taige, if I tell you that you need a doctor, you’re going, even if I have to throw your skinny ass over my shoulder.”
Rose smacked Dante lightly on the arm. “You watch how you talk to her, boy. And don’t worry. You say she needs a doctor, she’s going to a doctor, and there isn’t a damn thing she can do about it, either.”
“SO did she make you go to the hospital?”
The shadow fell over Taige, and she opened her eyes, squinting up at Cullen. The sun was at his back, and she couldn’t make out his face very well, but she recognized his voice. He crouched down beside her, and she lifted her sunglasses onto her head, meeting his eyes. He winced and touched his fingers to her swollen left eye. “Ouch.”
The touch was gentle. It didn’t hurt at all. But Taige wished it would have. Hurt would have been a little better than her reaction. Heat. Just that gentle touch had her heart pounding in her chest. Taige had always snorted when she read things like that, how just some guy’s touch could do that, but until now, she hadn’t ever had it happen, hadn’t ever believed it could happen.
But with her heart racing away in her chest, she had little choice but to believe just that. “It’s just bruised. Dante tried to make me go, said there could have been scratches on my cornea or something.” Then she shrugged. “I waited until the doctors’ offices opened and went to the clinic. Dante’s got a friend that works there, and he took a look at me. Made Rose happy, and it got Dante off my back.”
“They family?”
Taige shook her head. “No, at least not by blood. Rose knew my mom and dad, though. I’ve known her since I was a baby.” She grimaced and added, “And the way Rose acts, you’d think I still was a baby.”
“She was worried. Can’t blame her for that.”
He dropped down on the blanket next to her. His leg brushed against hers, totally by accident, she was sure. She just hoped he couldn’t see the look on her face. Nonchalant as possible, she shifted away. Not because she d
idn’t want him touching her, but if she wanted to actually carry on a conversation with him, he couldn’t be touching her. She’d start mumbling and stammering and acting like some stupid . . . girl. How embarrassing.
“Since you didn’t go to the hospital, I guess you didn’t call the police, either,” Cullen was saying.
“No reason to,” she said, shrugging. “I wasn’t hurt, not really.” Then she grinned, a mean, nasty grin. “Dante came home the next day, and his mama had to play doctor on his hands. He looked like he went a few rounds with a brick wall, the way his hands were torn up.”
Cullen laughed. “Well, that would explain it. I ran into one of those guys at the store. He saw me and took off in the other direction, but not before I saw his face. He looks like he got hit by a brick wall. A few times.”
A breeze drifted by, and she caught her hair in her hand, holding it out of her face as she stole a glance at him. “I don’t know if I remembered to say thank you.”
He reached out, caught a thick curl, and tucked it behind her ear. “Nothing to say thanks for. Anybody—”
She shook her head. “No. Not anybody would have done it.” Sadly, she knew that not even half of anybody would have gotten involved. Sucked knowing the things she knew sometimes.
“Yeah, well . . .” He shrugged it off, and she grinned a little as she realized he was uncomfortable. His cheeks were tanned, but not tanned enough to hide the dull rush of color as he blushed. He focused his gaze out over the blue green waters of the Gulf. “I’m glad I saw you out here. We’re heading back home day after tomorrow, and I’ve been worried. Didn’t know how to find you, except going back out to your friend’s house. And I tried that. Got lost.”
Taige grinned, hiding the rush of pleasure at the thought of him looking for her. Then she felt like an idiot. He was a nice guy. After what he’d done, she knew just how much of a nice guy he was. So he’d been worried. No reason to read anything else into it.
But she knew it wasn’t going to keep her from thinking about him after he’d gone. She realized she was still staring at him and grinning like a fool, and she shifted her gaze back out to the beach. “So where is home?”
“Georgia. Small town about an hour north of Atlanta, close to the Tennessee state line.” From the corner of her eye, she could see that he was staring out at the Gulf, smiling faintly. “Going to miss the beach. Easy to get used to it.”
Taige had to agree. “I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
“My dad bought one of the condos, so we’ll be back. Not sure when.” He paused for a minute, and Taige glanced over at him to realize that now he was the one staring. At her. “Maybe I’ll see you when we come back.”
Her heart skipped a beat. She almost blurted out something totally lame, like Oh, I’d love that. But she managed, just barely, to keep her voice even and her comment to a simple, “I’m pretty much always around.”
An awkward silence fell. He cleared his throat, and Taige busied her hands by combing through her mass of hair and separating it into sections so she could braid it. From the corner of her eye, she could see him watching her, and she fumbled a little and had to start over. “Can I ask you something?” Cullen asked softly.
She tensed. She had a feeling she knew what he was going to ask—or at least some variation of it. “What?” she asked warily. She didn’t really consider herself touchy when people asked her, but it did make her a little uncomfortable and irritated her that people could be so damn nosy. She hadn’t thought that Cullen would be the kind to meddle like that.
But to her surprise, he didn’t ask her if she was black, or mixed, or any other polite variation of a rather nosy question. What he did ask, though, wasn’t any easier.
“I was just wondering what happened to your parents.”
Her gut reflex was, I killed them. She’d said it before. It wasn’t a new thought. She’d woken up late that last night—the night they’d died—and she’d been screaming for Mama and Daddy, but they were gone. They’d gone out to get some dinner, see a movie, and they’d left her with the teenager who lived across the street from them in the small Mobile suburb. Taige couldn’t even remember the girl’s name now—just the look on her face as she stared down at Taige, screaming in the bed and calling for help.
The girl had freaked out and called her own mother. Taige didn’t remember that woman’s name, either, though she remembered how she’d smelled. Like lotion and Ici. To this day, anything that even resembled the way that discount perfume had smelled was enough to make Taige sick. The woman had held her and tried to calm her down, murmuring some nonsense about nightmares and bad dreams.
All the way up until the knock on the door, nearly three hours later. Taige could remember the cops standing in the door, and the grim look on their faces. They’d made her leave the room, but she didn’t need to hear to know what happened. Her mama and daddy were dead.
Her voice was hoarse and rough as she answered, “They were killed by a drunk driver when I was little.” She swallowed, cleared her throat to try to ease the pressure there. “We lived in Mobile. They’d gone out. Date night, Mama called it. Somebody hit them on their way to the movies, killed them instantly.”
She kept her face averted as she wiped the tears away. It still hurt. Eight years later, it still hurt. “Mama grew up here. They found my mama’s older brother, Leon, and sent me to live with him. They never could find any of my dad’s folks.” Taige had long since stopped hoping for that to happen, although there had been years when she had been convinced that if she prayed hard enough, if she was good enough, somebody would come and get her. Somebody who loved her.
“That’s got to suck,” he said. “Mom and Dad drive me nuts, but I can’t imagine losing them like that. Being sent off to live with somebody else. Even family. They might love you, but it can’t be the same.”
“He doesn’t love me.” The words slipped out of her before she even realized it. She hadn’t meant to say that, not in front of him, but there was no taking the words back, and she didn’t want to, either. She hated pretending that her life with Leon Carson was fine, that he took care of her, that he even gave a damn about her. “He hates me. Hates having me there.”
Then she shoved to her feet, grabbed her stuff, grabbed the tote lying on its side in the sand. She shoved everything inside it, her bottled water, the book she’d been trying to read, her sunglasses. But Cullen was still sitting on the beach blanket, and she didn’t want to wait for him to get up, so she just left it. “I’ve got to get home.”
“Hey . . .”
She strode away, sand flying beneath her feet. The sand muffled the sound of his footsteps until he was right behind her. Before he could touch her, she turned around and stared at him. She lifted her chin insolently and demanded, “What?”
“I didn’t mean . . . I’m . . .” Cullen seemed to fumble for the words. He reached up, scratched his head, squinted at her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry or piss you off or whatever got you so mad.”
She wasn’t mad. She was humiliated. She tucked her chin against her chest and turned away. “It’s no big deal. I just got to get home.”
“Why?” he asked bluntly.
Taige glanced up at him. “Because I want to?”
“If he really hates you, why would you want to go home?” And to that, Taige really didn’t have an answer. She stood there with a scowl on her face. He reached out and caught her bag. She tried to hold on to the straps for a few seconds, but he wasn’t letting go, either, and she wasn’t going to stand there and fight him over who got to carry it. Then he held out his other hand, wordlessly.
Slowly, Taige put her hand in his, and he led her away. It never even occurred to her to ask him where they were going. Taige didn’t care.
The Missing Page 4
