by Skye Jordan
Austin paused his slow swagger about eight feet away. “Zane found Trace and JT.”
Avery’s footsteps stopped and her stomach seized up. Something about the way he’d phrased that made Avery cold. “JT?”
“You didn’t know it was JT who stole the van?”
“No, I didn’t see the driver.” And now Avery’s fear intensified. A fear that cut so deep, she couldn’t process it in the moment. So she slapped a Band-Aid on and asked the hardest question of her life. “Are they . . .” She had to force air into her lungs to speak. “Is Trace okay?”
Headlights turned onto the driveway. Avery’s gaze jumped that direction but didn’t find the Jeep Trace had taken or the truck JT had stolen. She found Ethan’s truck turning in. And her heart fell.
“Austin,” Avery said, drawing his gaze back. “Is Trace okay?”
Austin’s gaze returned to the road, where Zane’s black SUV slowed and followed Ethan’s truck. “Well, here comes Zane. I guess we’ll see.”
Her focus jumped to a third set of headlights behind the SUV and found the rental truck coming in behind Zane. All Avery’s air whooshed out in relief. A second driver meant Trace had to be okay.
She didn’t get a chance to think about anything else before Ethan and Delaney parked and her sister rushed to her, wrapping Avery tight. “Are you okay?”
Suddenly she wasn’t so sure. “I just want to make sure Trace is okay.”
As the other cars made their way to the café, Avery explained what had happened. And by the time Zane stood from the driver’s seat, Delaney and Ethan wore the same grim expression.
“He’s in the back,” Zane told the other deputies. “Put on gloves. He’s bloody. You should probably call a medic.”
“Shit,” Avery said under her breath, and she pulled free from Delaney to rush to the driver’s side of the van, ignoring the deputies as they moved toward Zane’s car. She put her hands on the door and looked through the window. “Trace?”
He put the car into park, turned off the engine—everything in super slow motion—then looked at her through the glass. And a chill traveled the entire length of her spine. His eyes were dark and guarded. His face smudged and dirty.
She pulled open the door, already choking on his name. “Trace?” The light came on, and all the shadows turned red. His face, his chest, his arms—he had blood smears and drips and splatters everywhere. “Oh my God. What . . . ? How . . . ?”
“I’m okay,” he said, his voice low, gaze cast down and away as he climbed from the truck with the pained movement of an eighty-year-old. “What the fuck is everyone doing here?”
Sirens grew closer, and as soon as Trace moved from the truck, she saw the blood remaining on the driver’s seat and gasped. He turned and followed her gaze, which gave her a look at the mess of blood on his back. Sickness roiled low in her gut. One that was dark and confusing and deeply troubling. “Oh God, Trace.”
The emergency vehicles turned up the driveway.
“Who the fuck called them?” Trace muttered, then yelled at his brother. “Goddammit, Zane, get everyone out of here. This isn’t a fucking circus.”
“No, you need them,” Avery told him. “Delaney, send the ambulance over here first.”
“No.” His dark, almost feral bark shocked her quiet. He kept his eyes down. “The last thing you need is everyone watching me get patched up from a fight with the convict I hired and who tried to steal your equipment.” His voice was low and harsh in a way that pierced her chest with a cold streak. “I’ve caused enough trouble for you for one fucking lifetime. I’m fine. Everything is superficial. I’ll go to the ER after I talk to the cops and check the equipment. Right now I’m going to put a shirt on and wash my face so I don’t look like a fucking animal.”
Avery just stood there, stunned silent as he walked past and quickly disappeared into the café. She pulled in a stuttering breath, her chest as tight as if she’d been physically hit. Her gaze focused on the seat again, and she swallowed hard. The thought of him hitting the ground with his bare skin . . . of how he’d gotten the bruises forming around his eye and cheekbone, the cuts on his lips, nose, chin, cheek.
Avery started to shake. Tears flooded her eyes. He’d just been in bed with her forty-five minutes ago. Safe and happy and so gentle . . . Her mind spiraled and tangled. Her thoughts jumped around. Things started to disconnect. Nothing made sense.
“Hey.” Delaney’s soft voice slipped into her thoughts. “You okay?”
Avery shook her head and gestured to the seat. “What?” Then to the café where he’d disappeared. “He . . .” Her brain chugged, chugged, chugged, but the gears wouldn’t turn. She pushed both hands into her hair and choked out, “I don’t know what’s happening.”
Ethan passed, squeezing Delaney’s shoulder and murmuring, “I’m gonna check the equipment.”
Avery crossed her arms tight and followed. She held her breath as Ethan fought with the doors. Finally saying, “They opened fine earlier.”
“The equipment probably just shifted.”
Avery’s stomach dropped.
Fifty feet away, two cops flanked JT and pulled him from the back of Zane’s SUV. The sight of him made Avery pull in a sharp breath. His face looked even worse than Trace’s. One eye bloody and swollen shut, lips cut and puffy, cuts everywhere, blood everywhere. Trace may not have given JT that black eye and that cut lip in the picture she’d seen, but he most definitely had given him everything that was fresh tonight. And the amount of damage stunned her.
Trace had done that.
Her Trace had done that. With his own hands.
She shook her head, overwhelmed by the severity. By the sheer brutality.
Avery tightened her arms, suddenly so cold. Feeling so small. So weak. So fragile—emotionally and physically. The way she used to feel around her father.
The cops sat JT on a gurney, and the EMTs started working on him.
“You take that one.” Trace’s voice startled Avery, and she turned her head back so fast, she lost her balance and stumbled a little.
Delaney grabbed her arm to steady her and gave her a concerned stare. “Avery?”
“Just lost my balance,” she muttered.
“Trace,” Austin said, coming around the end of the truck. “We’re going to need a statement.”
“Yeah, just a minute.”
He helped Ethan unblock the doors, and each man pulled one door open, exposing all her gorgeous equipment, equipment that she’d painstakingly chosen, paid her last dollar for, and needed installed immediately to open the café on time, thrown in the back of the truck like a mishmash of garage sale leftovers.
Avery covered her mouth, stifling a sob.
“Fuck.” Trace bit out the word and put his hands on his hips. And while he was staring at the mess in the back of the truck, blood was seeping through his T-shirt.
“Not too bad . . . ,” she heard Ethan say, but his voice faded in and out. “Everything looks intact . . .”
But she couldn’t follow the conversation as blood created a dot-and-blotch pattern on Trace’s back. Her head went light. A ring started low in her ears and built as her vision dimmed.
“Whoa, Avery?” Delaney’s voice brought Avery back when she was halfway to the floor. With Delaney’s help, Avery caught herself before she fainted and straightened, but Delaney looked scared.
Trace turned, his frown so dark, his face so bruised, so cut, she saw a whole different man there. “Avery?”
He closed the distance with his brow pulled tight. Her gaze caught on his hand rising to her face, his fingers in a gentle curl, the way they were when he cupped her face. But she caught the sight of his knuckles, raw and red and still bleeding.
Avery saw her father’s knuckles from all his drunken brawls, the knuckles he’d raised to her and Delaney and Chloe so many times. And she flinched and shrank away.
Trace’s hand froze; his gaze dropped to his hand and held. And something happened behind his
eyes. Something she didn’t recognize.
He dropped his hand, and the combination of resignation and pain on his face tore at Avery’s heart. “I . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“No. It’s okay.” He nodded. And when his head finally lifted, he looked like an empty shell. “It’s . . . right. It’s the way it should be.”
She shook her head. “What?”
He put his hands at his hips again and kept his focus on the ground. “I’ll call a buddy of mine who lives nearby. He just had a job fall through. I’ll have him come and finish up.”
She stepped out of Delaney’s hold with a new lick of fear and pain twining inside her. “What?”
“The only way you’re going to save any face on this, the only way your business is going to survive for your opening, is if I walk away and you tell everyone you fired me.” He met her gaze, but it was in a guarded, distant, businesslike way. “I’ll call my friend, have him over here in the morning. He’s good, and he’s got a crew. I’ll work out the payment with him. He’ll have you up and running in two days. You’ll make your opening.”
An icy shaft speared her right down the middle. “You’re walking away from me?”
“Avery,” Delaney’s voice interjected softly. “You need to think about your business right now. I think Trace has a smart idea.”
“Fuck smart ideas,” she said, but she said it to Trace, not to Delaney. “You promised you’d have this ready for my opening day.”
Even as she said it, she realized how stupid she’d been to believe another damn promise. When would she learn?
He remained cool and distant. “It will be ready for your—”
“No, you promised.” She closed the distance between them and jabbed his chest. “You promised me, Trace.”
“If I stay and finish this job,” he said deliberately, “you won’t have a business to open.”
Avery wanted to scream that she’d rather have him than the business. But she’d been here before. She’d tried to tell David she’d rather have a husband who was gone as much as he was gone than to end their marriage. And look where that had gotten her.
She couldn’t force Trace to love her now any more than she’d been able to force David to fall back in love with her then. And she couldn’t even force Trace to let her love him. She’d held on to David six years too long. She wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
“I’m not going to keep you where you don’t want to be.” She pushed the words out, but she was breaking inside. “So if you don’t want to be here, go. But I’ll find my own way to finish the job. Tell your friend to find other work.”
To keep herself from watching another man she loved walk out of her life—she was two for two, quite a record—Avery turned and walked away first.
EIGHTEEN
Trace wanted to die.
He lay sprawled on his bed, belly down, head turned so his good cheek pressed against the pillow. The right side of his face, where he’d taken most of JT’s punches, was swollen, and his back had scabbed over. Mostly. He’d needed nine stitches to close various deeper cuts on his face and hand.
The day after a fight was always the worst. He’d learned that in the prison infirmary.
His dad appeared in the doorway. “What was I going to the kitchen for?”
“Ice.” It was the third time his father had returned to ask. And he didn’t even remember having to ask the time before.
He gave Trace that blank stare.
“Ice, for me, Dad.”
“Oh, right.” He nodded, but still stared, confused. “What happened to you?”
Trace sighed. “Can you just get the ice?”
“Sure, sure.”
But after his dad left the room, the television clicked on, and a chair in the living room creaked.
Trace groaned and reached for the Advil on his nightstand. He popped three pills into his mouth and washed them down with water, wishing they would do something for the pain in his chest.
When he replaced the bottle on the nightstand, his gaze held on the clock: 2:15 p.m. He wondered how Avery was handling everything today. Wondered if Delaney had found someone to finish the café for her. He’d tried calling Avery twice already in hopes of talking her into letting his friend come help, but she wasn’t answering.
Not that he blamed her.
And fuck, that just made all the memories flood back in—the panic on her face when she’d begged him not to go after the truck, the relief swamping her when he’d returned, the alarm when she’d seen his injuries . . . But the worst—the very worst—had been her fear. That spark of fear when he’d reached out to touch her . . .
A throbbing ache kicked up at the center of his chest. Yeah, that was the real killer. After everything they’d been through and shared, she was still afraid of him.
But again, he couldn’t blame her. He’d been thinking about this for the last twelve hours while he hadn’t been able to sleep. He had been beaten up and covered in blood. JT had looked just as bad. By going after JT like a vigilante and kicking the other man’s ass just to get the appliances back, Trace had proven that while he may have paid his debt to society, he was still living on the edge of acceptable behavior.
And for the good girl who lived to please and nurture others with an ingrained need to make all things right, Trace had to look like a broken man with too many missing pieces to salvage the whole.
“Why aren’t you at work?” His father was in Trace’s room again and now shuffled to Trace’s bed and lowered to the edge.
Trace had already told his dad a half-dozen times why he wasn’t at work, but he told him again. “Because my job is over.”
But in some ways, Trace felt like his life had ended along with that job. At least the spark of life that had kept him going over the last few months. A spark named Avery.
“Then why aren’t you finding a new job? You’ve never been one to sit around.”
Trace huffed a laugh, but he didn’t smile. “Because I hurt everywhere.”
George looked at Trace as if noticing the bruises and cuts for the first time. “Oh, yeah, you’re a mess, aren’t you? Probably couldn’t get a job lookin’ like that anyway.”
“Good point.” And just one more bubble burst.
The front door opened, and Gram’s voice floated down the hall. “Hello, boys. I brought goodies.”
George’s face lit up. His posture straightened, and a smile turned his mouth. “Avery brought turnovers.”
Trace groaned. His father could remember Avery and her apple turnovers, but he couldn’t remember to bring ice from the kitchen.
Pearl stepped into the bedroom. George’s smile fell, and he shot Trace a look. “I don’t think that’s Avery.”
“Good eye, son.” Pearl found that amusing. “And what are all the handsome men in my life doing back here?” She didn’t wait for an answer. Pearl started toward Trace and ran her hand over his hair the way she had when he’d been sick as a kid. “Poor Trace. How are you feeling, honey?”
“As good as I look.” And he couldn’t take all this fuss. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to sit up. “Since you’re here, Gram, I’m going to run to the café.”
If he could stand without passing out.
His grandmother didn’t like that idea, but she was too busy answering George’s questions about apple turnovers to keep after Trace, and he slipped out of the house. He rehearsed his apology for the tenth time since he’d returned home that morning on his drive. His palms were sweating when he turned onto the café’s driveway.
His hopes died when he found the Jeep missing from where Ethan had parked it in front of the café last night. Ethan’s truck sat in its place. That meant either Ethan and Delaney were here or they’d taken the Jeep into the shop and Avery was using Ethan’s truck until she could afford her own car.
Considering the simple logistics of making sure everyone in the family had a car would now be a huge ordeal since Trace had gone and pu
t one out of commission.
Footsteps on the gravel tripped his heart. He turned his head, hoping to see Avery.
“Hey.” Delaney walked toward his truck instead. She didn’t look angry, but she didn’t look happy either. She leaned against Ethan’s truck, her gaze narrowed against the sun. “You look worse than refried shit.”
“Feel worse.”
“You should.” Her gaze slid over his arm and rested on his hand. “Bet those knuckles hurt.” Her tone quieted. “My dad had knuckles like that.”
Trace’s mind flashed to the moment he’d reached out to Avery, to her eyes darting to his hand, to her flinch . . .
“I just talked to Ethan,” Delaney said, cutting into Trace’s thoughts. “He’s at the insurance adjuster’s office. They have the police report and talked to the truck rental company. There will be some hoops to jump through, but they’re going to give us market value for the Jeep, less our deductible.”
Trace’s brain realigned, and he breathed a little better. One good turn of events. “What’s the deductible? I’ll get a cashier’s check from the bank and drop it off later today.”
“Well, since you actually had your head out of your ass when you rented the truck and took out insurance with the rental company, it’s going to cover the deductible.”
Wow, why couldn’t he get that lucky in other areas of his life?
“Too bad all your decisions couldn’t be so well thought out,” Delaney said.
Bingo.
He nodded again, wondering what the best decision would be now—to check on Avery or just leave. The whole idea of walking away last night had been so he wouldn’t be associated with her. Yet here he was . . .
He’d made such smart decisions up until Avery. Ever since then, he’d been impulsive and reckless.
And spontaneous and alive.
And happy.
“Didn’t expect to see you here again.” Delaney crossed her arms and gave him that contemplative look.
