“It’s okay. She’s fine. Tamara is fine. And you are going to be fine, too. I promise.” Gently brushing the tears from her face, he winked at her again.
“Why?” she asked him.
“Why what, honey?”
“Why? If we’ve never met, why have you stayed with me? Why are you here with me? I heard you, the things you said. You wouldn’t leave, you said you couldn’t leave. Why?”
He laughed at the question. He couldn’t explain it to her. It was a completely reasonable question that he had absolutely no way of answering. “I don’t know. All I do know is that when I picked you up and carried you out of that burning apartment, I felt like from that moment on you were my responsibility. I just couldn’t leave you. I had to make sure you were okay.”
“You saved my life?”
With a slight nod of his head, he tried to dismiss it. “Perhaps I did, but you’ve been the one fighting for it for the past week and a half. I still can’t believe you’re actually awake. Now, I want you to get some rest. I didn’t sit here with you all this time to have you overdo things and hurt yourself worse. And don’t worry. I’ll be right here when you wake up.”
“But I–I don’t want to sleep. That’s all I’ve been doing.” She said the words despite her eyelids getting heavy and starting to close on their own.
“But nothing. Get some sleep. You need all the rest you can get. I’ll be right here when you wake up. I promise.”
“But what about your life? Don’t you have a job to get back to? I don’t want you to get into trouble.” Her words were barely coherent and coming out jumbled. She was slowly drifting into sleep.
He laughed at her before saying, “I don’t have a job, sweetheart. I’m sort of, shall we say, independently wealthy. It’s a curse, but what are you going to do?” He leaned over and kissed her forehead before she fell completely under and succumbed to sleep.
Chapter One
Present day
Shelby sat in the crowded food court as she waited for him. She opened her package of plastic silverware as she began picking at her salad. It didn’t look very appealing to the eye or her stomach. However, she reminded herself once again that she didn’t need all of the extra calories that come along with the wonderful smells wafting through the air. She took a bite of her lunch begrudgingly, wishing she could just dig into a cheeseburger instead. But she told herself, as she had many times in the past couple of months, that it would all be worthwhile once she got on the scale in two more days.
While eating her lunch, she thought of all of the weight she had lost. She had never really been fat and had always been fairly healthy her whole life. It wasn’t until six months ago that things had changed. After her body began to heal from her attack, she was faced with something even harder to overcome. Although her physical scars were fading, the emotional ones had just begun to show themselves.
She hadn’t remembered much of the attack when she first woke up in that hospital room six months ago. There were vague memories and bits and pieces of images that would flash through her mind. But no real details. Although that all changed a couple of weeks after she woke up. She began having nightmares. It didn’t take a genius to figure out they were more than mere nightmares, though. They were actual memories. Memories of that horrible night when Brent had raped her over and over again slowly started seeping their way into her subconscious. She wasn’t certain the amount of times he had raped her, but it wasn’t long until the memories all pieced themselves together, like that of a giant puzzle. Then she remembered it all, every horrific detail.
She thought of Tamara, her best friend. Shelby still hated herself for her actions. If only she hadn’t wanted Brent and gone after him the way she did. If only she had done things differently, maybe they both would have been spared his brutality. The only small consolation Shelby felt was that Tamara hadn’t been raped as well. Brent had beaten her, choked her, and threatened her, but at least she had escaped the emotional turmoil left behind by rape.
She shook her head as she remembered. What had made her fall so hard for Brent? What had made her think she was in love with him? She was so desperate to have him that she seduced her best friend’s boyfriend with lies and betrayal. If only she had known then that he was sick and twisted. If only any of them had known just how unbalanced he was. Thinking about it now made it seem like it had happened a lifetime ago. Yet at other times, times when she was in therapy, she felt like it had just happened. Taking another bite of her salad, she reminded herself that her weight loss was just one more step in her recovery. Although Tamara and her husband, Jack, as well as Rex, didn’t understand it, it was important to Shelby to be in control of her mind, body, and soul. They might have only seen her weight gain as a mild side effect of her depression. But to her it became a symbol of defeat. If she allowed herself and her body to be altered by the events of that night, it was like letting him violate her all over again.
She was chewing on her rabbit food as she glanced up and spotted him across the food court. He was an incredibly attractive man, with his extremely short, jet-black hair, eyes bluer than the depths of the Caribbean Sea, and the cutest dimples all packaged together in a well maintained and darkly tanned hard and muscular physique. He was heading her way, carrying a tray of food and smiling, displaying those handsome dimples. As she watched him take long strides toward her with his long, muscled legs, she could honestly say he was probably one of the most ruggedly handsome men she had ever laid eyes on. He was, after all, a former Navy SEAL. A former Navy SEAL who had brought many women to their knees. She laughed. He was a Romeo, a Lothario, and women loved him. He stopped right in front of her, set down his tray, and leaned over her to place a gentle kiss to her cheek.
“Well, if it isn’t Ms. Shelby Moore. As always, you are gorgeous. I’m sorry I was late. Say you forgive me?” He winked at her.
“Well, if it isn’t Rex Metcalf. Nice of you to join me,” she teased as she glanced at her watch. “I’m only kidding. Of course I forgive you. Don’t I always? So, which was it this time? A brunette, blonde, redhead, or all of the above?” Shelby asked, laughing.
Holding a hand to his heart, Rex tried to appear wounded and shocked by her question. “I can’t believe you would think such a thing. You know you’re the only woman for me.” He knew she would see it as a joke. Only he knew how close that statement came to the center of the chaos that had been his life for the past several weeks. Even sitting across from her, he couldn’t place when things had started to change between them. All he knew was that one day he looked at her, and his best friend and his buddy was suddenly someone who meant much more. He had stopped seeing the battered victim, the emotional wreck who had cried on his shoulder so many nights. Instead, he saw a woman, a gorgeous, stunning, and arousing woman. God help him!
“Yeah, the only woman this hour!” She laughed at him.
They had such an easy friendship. He knew she had come to rely on it so much in the past months. He was one of only two people she felt like she could truly tell her innermost feelings to. The other was, of course, Tamara, and he knew Shelby was grateful to still have her in her life. Especially since her mistake of becoming fixated on Tamara’s ex-boyfriend, Brent, had nearly cost them both their lives.
Sometimes, she would tell him she didn’t feel as though she deserved the forgiveness Tamara gave her. But nonetheless, Tamara had forgiven her and had since married Jack, a man who adored her. And while her husband, Jack, always went out of his way to make Shelby feel welcome in their home, and Rex appreciated that,, especially since he knew Shelby didn’t feel completely at ease around him. At least not like she did with him.
There she was. Sitting across from him, just smiling at him. He remembered what it felt like just six months ago when she woke up in that hospital room and he saw her eyes staring back at him for the first time. The affection he had shown her over these past months came natural to him, but lately he was feeling much more than friendship. He wasn’
t seeing the battered and bruised woman he rescued all those months ago. Now he was just seeing the woman.
“Yoo-hoo, you still with me?” Rex waved his hand in front of her face.
“Yes, sorry. I was just thinking how cruel you are sitting here eating that double cheeseburger in front of me when I’m nibbling on lettuce.” She gave him her best pouting face.
“You, as I have explained many times, do not need to eat that. You have a gorgeous body. I don’t care what any scale says. You are perfect just the way you are.” Winking again, he smiled.
Rather than accept the compliment with grace, she snapped at him. “Rex, damn it, you know how important this is to me. After the…after he…after that night and the recuperation, I got depressed and just lost myself in food. I ate, and I ate, thinking it would fill the ache and make the pain go away. Why can’t you understand how important this is to me? I have to finish this. I feel like if I reach my goal then I’ve won, not him. Then he won’t have power over me anymore. I’m tired of what happened. I’m tired of talking about it, remembering it, dwelling on it. I don’t want what happened to me to affect my life anymore.” With a sigh, she calmed her nerves. She looked at Rex and whispered, “I want to be beautiful again.”
“Shelby, honey.” Rex got up from his chair and came to kneel beside her. “Don’t you know you’re beautiful? God, how could you not see that? And I should know. I happen to be a connoisseur of beautiful women.” Rex gently wiped the stray tear that began to fall from her eye.
“I know you think that, Rex, and I love you for it. I really do. But I need to feel beautiful. I need to feel whole again. I need to feel like what he did doesn’t matter. I don’t want it to matter anymore. I know you have all been so wonderful to me. You and Tamara have been so supportive, and Jack had his best personal trainer work with me in his gym. I know I don’t deserve all the patience you have given me. But I truly am grateful.” She smiled and gave him a hug.
They were so close that sometimes it made his heart ache. He was her best friend. She might not realize it, but at times, she was actually closer to him than she was to Tamara. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her. He was always there to cheer her up and make her feel better. Tamara was good to her, too, but she spent more time with Jack. After all, they were newlyweds and trying to start a family.
Pulling back from the hug, Rex gave her another wink. It was his modus operandi. If Rex didn’t wink at her then something was off in the universe.
“Come on, forget the rabbit food. I’m buying you an ice cream cone.” It broke his heart every time she doubted herself. And the idea that she didn’t feel beautiful would almost be funny if it wasn’t so unbelievable. She had the silkiest dark brown hair. Her eyes were a vibrant greenish blue, and sometimes they reminded him of a dark turquoise, and her skin was creamy and always felt so luxuriously soft. She was the epitome of beauty. How could she not see that?
“Rex, no. I can’t. I have my final training session tomorrow night, and then I weigh in the next day.” He was already grabbing her by the hand and dragging her to the other end of the food court.
“You are going to eat an ice cream cone, and you’re going to like it. I hardly think it would look appropriate if I held you down on one of these tables and force-fed it to you. Besides, one scoop of ice cream is not going to make you any less gorgeous than you already are. So, what’s it going to be? Chocolate or vanilla?” They came to a stop in front of a vendor selling cones by the scoop.
She looked at him with a hint of annoyance but still smirked. “I guess chocolate. But if I gain one ounce, I am going to hold you personally responsible.”
They ate their cones as Rex walked her back to work. On days like this, he loved the fact that he didn’t have to work. Sure, there were some days when he was so bored he couldn’t see straight. But on days like today, when he could walk in the sunshine with Shelby, see the smile on her face as she ate an ice cream cone, these were the days that made everything worthwhile.
His parents died when he was barely a teenager, and his inheritance money stayed in a trust account while he’d been shuffled from foster home to foster home. When he entered the Navy at the age of eighteen, he hadn’t even given the money much thought. It wasn’t until many years later, after he left the Navy and the SEALs, that he met with a quirky old man. The man, Mr. McDonald, had been named trustee by the courts to oversee the inheritance left to him by his parents. Two decades of wise investments turned the quarter of a million dollars into millions. Even though Rex now made his own financial decisions, he continued to watch that money grow. He sometimes wondered why he had gotten so lucky. Sometimes he thought maybe it was because his parents were taken from him at such a young age. But now, spending time like this with Shelby, it all seemed perfectly clear. Because no amount of money, no job, nothing could be as important as just being with her.
After he walked her back to her office, he gave her one of his customary kisses on the cheek. She had no idea how badly he wanted to turn his head just a couple of inches to the left so that the kiss would have been on her mouth. Just the thought of kissing her was making his pulse race. The past couple of weeks he had been coming up with every stupid excuse he could muster just to spend more time with her. This was saying a lot since they spent nearly all of their free time together anyway. He wasn’t dating anymore. He hadn’t slept with a woman in well over a month, and he didn’t even care. Somehow, somewhere along the way, he had fallen for his best friend. Damn, Metcalf, you are so screwed!
Later that day, Shelby finished the last of her dictation from the attorney she was now working for. Shelby really liked her job as a legal secretary and was thankful that Tamara had helped her get it. Especially since her last employer hadn’t been very understanding about the time she took off from work all those months ago. It was only a few minutes after five o’clock. She knew if she hurried she would be able to get to the gym and get a workout in with Tamara. She was surprised, but it seemed that even after everything that had happened, they were better friends now than before.
Driving home, her mind kept wandering back to that time only months before when she had nearly destroyed hers and Tamara’s lives. Sometimes, she still hated herself for it and tried her best to deal with the guilt every day. But as Tamara had told her many times, she had forgiven her. It was time for Shelby to forgive herself. She cringed as she remembered how she had been so riddled with jealousy of Tamara and her own insecurities that she seduced Brent. For reasons that were no longer clear to her, she believed she was in love with him. He had seemed like the perfect guy. At the time, she had no idea how far from the truth that was.
After all of the therapy she had been through the past several months, she realized what she was really after. Acceptance. Acceptance from what society looked at as being the ideal man, the ideal relationship. She thought that would make her the ideal woman. She couldn’t have been more wrong.
Therapy had also forced her to go back and deal with the pain of her upbringing. It took a lot of courage, more than she thought she had. She had locked some of those memories of her childhood away for so long, some of it was all but forgotten. She had wanted to quit. Once the memories started flooding back, she had never wanted to go to another therapy session again. Tamara encouraged her to keep going, but Rex was the one who pushed the issue. He was the one who never gave up on her.
Reliving all of the memories of the “uncles” who her mother brought home who had touched her when she was so young and so innocent was sometimes more than she could handle. The further realization and pain came when she remembered all the times she went to her mother at the young age of thirteen and begged her to help her so they would stop. Her mother merely yelled at her, screamed at her, called her a troublemaker and a liar, and reminded her that she was being a selfish girl with no respect. She would also be reminded of all of the sacrificing her mother had done for her. Shelby, to this day, couldn’t remember a single thing her mother had sacri
ficed for her, though. She always seemed more worried about her next sugar daddy.
Years later, when she finally reached a breaking point and decided she had had enough of the rapes and molestation by the numerous men brought into her home, she decided to get smart. She devised a way to get proof. She went to her mother with her proof. It was a poorly recorded audio tape she had hidden in her room. She had figured once she had evidence that they were raping her then her mother would have to believe her.
When she walked into the kitchen that night, with the latest man sitting across from her mother, she was all but breathing fire. She stalked right over to her mother and slammed the tape on the table in front of her. “He raped me last night, Mom. When you were at the bar with your friends, he walked into my bedroom and raped me, even though I screamed no. And I have proof this time.” She said it as her eyes swept to the tape. Instantly, she knew something was wrong. The look on her mother’s face wasn’t the look of a mother being faced with the worst kind of truth.
Her mother looked at her current lover, looked at the tape, and then stared at Shelby with an icy intensity. “You have proof of this rape? You recorded it?”
Not quite sure how to measure her mother’s response, she told her the truth. “Yes, I recorded it all. I recorded my screams, my protests, and my pleas for him to stop. But he still wouldn’t.”
Her mother glanced at the tape again and picked it up, eyeing it as if it were some sort of foreign object she had never seen before. She stood up with the tape in her hands, and with a fierce look in her eyes, she hit Shelby so hard she stumbled halfway across the room and landed on the floor. “You are a selfish little bitch. Who do you think pays for your clothes, your food, and this home. These men do. Don’t be so stupid, Shelby. Women were put on this planet to give men pleasure, and in return, they take care of us. How dare you record this and call it rape. He paid for that outfit you are wearing right now.” Her mother stalked over to the counter, opened a drawer, and took out the meat tenderizing mallet. With a swift hand, she smashed that tape into a million pieces.
Morgan, Nicole - Sweet Salvation [Sweet Awakenings 2] (Siren Publishing Allure) Page 2
