by M. O'Keefe
I know about jail. I know what happened. It doesn’t change anything for me. It doesn’t change who you are. When this is done, when I am done…I’m going to come back to you. To hear the story from your lips. To finish what we started.
And then:
If you’ll have me.
Something like hope burned through him, igniting in his gut and blasting out through his fingers, the tips of his hair. And he landed squarely in his body again. Squarely inside himself.
And that hope-like thing crystallized into a happiness-like thing.
Part of him screamed out a warning, but he ignored it. He’d been living alone in his regrets for too long. He would not let Annie be another regret.
I do owe you a few more hours on your birthday wish, he texted back, but then erased it, because he didn’t need to try and make it seem like he wasn’t invested. Like he didn’t care.
Instead he wrote: Yes. I will always have you.
ANNIE
Yes. I will always have you.
I tucked my happiness, my glee, behind all my serious thick walls of worry. About my life. My future.
But that hope kept me lit up, and I felt like I glowed, like a lantern. The future was not entirely scary. Not entirely unsure. When the bad stuff was over, there was something good waiting for me.
Something amazing.
Dylan.
The door to my trailer was unlocked. I hadn’t had time last night to find my keys, much less lock up after myself.
Had it only been last night? Really?
How much time did it take for everything to change? I’d moved like a snail through my life before. So slow to know what I wanted. So slow to change. That was over now. I was changing with every breath I took.
I took the metal steps up into my trailer, set down my bag in front of the stove, and turned to shut the door. I slammed it hard the first time so it didn’t bounce.
“Hello, Annie.”
The voice stilled my blood. My lungs. The world swam around me. Instinctively I glanced back toward those captain chairs I never sat in, just to be sure that my exhausted, overwhelmed mind wasn’t playing tricks on me.
But there he was in his faded Wranglers and the dark short-sleeved shirt with the pearl snaps. His hat, sweat-stained and dusty, sat on the chair next to him.
Hoyt.
In my trailer.
The half second it took me to process what was happening was a half second too long, and by the time I was fumbling with the door trying to get it open, trying to get out, away, he was on me.
My arm was locked in his hand, his fingers pushing the nerves on its underside hard into the bone. Immediately my hand went numb. His other hand was so big that when it covered my mouth it partially covered my nose, too, and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t…breathe.
“Annie,” he whispered. That little smile on his face revealing the crooked eyetooth, the chipped incisor from his days in the rodeo. “Please don’t make this worse. I need…You need to be good,” he said. “And not scream. Can you do that for me? Be good for me?”
His breath smelled like coffee and Halls. He used to eat cough drops like candy, and the scent, familiar and nauseating, sent terror through me. My eyes rolled in my head and I strained away from him. I sank my teeth into the meat of his hand.
“That’s a no,” he said, his face turning hard and awful, and I knew what was coming.
Perhaps it had always been coming. Despite running. Despite that zigzagging escape. Despite this sudden belief that I’d committed to just hours ago to stand up to him, to demand he get off my land and pay for what he’d done.
This moment had been what was in store for me all along.
Some things we just can’t outrun.
He hit me so hard my head bounced against the edge of the stove.
And the world went dark.
For Adam. For everything.
Acknowledgments
My life is rich with friends who inspire and help me. My gratitude is endless.
To Maureen McGowan, Ripley Vaughn, and Stephanie Doyle: you are the foundation of so many great things in my life. Thank you.
To Bonnie Staring, Shari Slade, and Carolyn Crane: thank you for your comments and support—your input made the books so much better. I’m really honored to have you in my corner.
To the Toronto Romance Writers, the Western New York Romance Writers, and the Ottawa Romance Writers: your workshops and the resulting lightbulb moments I had made these books possible.
Simone St. James, between the beers and the writer’s retreats¸ we’ve got a good thing going.
Pam Hopkins, my agent—an amazing compass constantly pointing me in the right direction.
Shauna Summers, Gina Wachtel, Sarah Murphy, and the rest of the amazing team at Bantam: your hard work and faith in these books has been humbling and inspiring.
And to my readers: I am just so blessed. Thank you.
BY M. O’KEEFE
Everything I Left Unsaid
WRITTEN AS MOLLY O’KEEFE
THE BOYS OF BISHOP NOVELS
Wild Child
Never Been Kissed
Between the Sheets
Indecent Proposal
CROOKED CREEK NOVELS
Can’t Buy Me Love
Can’t Hurry Love
Crazy Thing Called Love
About the Author
M. O’KEEFE can remember the exact moment her love of romance began; in seventh grade, when Mrs. Nelson handed her a worn paperback copy of The Thorn Birds. It wasn’t long before she was filling up notebooks with her own story ideas, featuring girls with glasses and talking cats. Writing as Molly O’Keefe, she has won two RITA awards and three RT Reviewers Choice Awards. She lives in Toronto, Canada, with her husband, two kids, and the largest heap of dirty laundry in North America. When she’s not writing, she’s imagining what she would say if she ever got stuck in an elevator with Bruce Springsteen.
molly-okeefe.com
Facebook.com/MollyOkeefeBooks
@MollyOKwrites
Annie and Dylan’s darkly emotional, wildly intense romance continues in the breathtaking sequel
Coming soon from Bantam Books
Continue reading for a sneak peek
ANNIE
Annie McKay came to slowly. Aware in pieces of her surroundings.
The pebbled linoleum of the trailer floor dug into her cheek. Her ankle was twisted, wedged against something hard.
The hot copper smell of blood made her stomach roil and she gagged.
“Annie, I’m sorry.”
That voice…oh God.
It was Hoyt. Her husband. Standing over her.
For heartbeats, lots of them, she wasn’t sure he was real. Perhaps she’d tripped and fallen, hit her head coming back into her trailer. She was hallucinating. Pulling Hoyt out of old nightmares. That made much more sense.
Because there was no way he could have found her here.
I was careful. I was so careful.
Two months ago, she’d run from him. Taking only the bruises around her neck and three thousand dollars from his safe. Desperate and scared, she left in the middle of the night and made her way in circles to this place. A patch of swamp called the Flowered Manor Trailer Park and Camp Ground in North Carolina.
Miles from Hoyt. From Oklahoma. From the farm where she’d lived her entire life.
And she’d been happy. The happiest she’d ever been. Not even two hours ago, she’d left Dylan and his magical house. Her body had been flush and alive and pleasured. And her mind had been clear.
She’d had plans, real plans, for her life, not just panicked and terrified reactions.
Everything had been about to get better.
“Annie?”
This is not a hallucination.
Be smart, Annie. Think!
“You hear what I said to you?”
She lay there silent. Hoyt hated her silence. Apologies were to be met with immediate acquiescence. His guil
t immediately assuaged.
But she said nothing. Because fuck him.
“Get up.”
She kept her eyes closed, because she wasn’t ready to actually see him. Not here. Not in this trailer. Her home.
Hoping to feel her phone still in her back pocket, she rolled onto her back.
Please, please, she prayed, please be there.
But there was nothing under her butt. The phone was gone.
“There you go. It ain’t so bad, is it? Get yourself up off the floor.” He said it like she’d fallen, like she’d landed on the floor through her own clumsy, stupid means.
Despite her best efforts, hot tears seeped under her lashes.
“Come on now.” His hands touched her hip and her armpit to help her up and she flinched away; her body screamed in pain. Unsteady, she got herself to her feet. She opened her eyes and the world swam. She grabbed the edge of the table, landing half on, half off the cushion of the settee.
“You’re getting blood all over the place.” His familiar hands, with their small scars and close-clipped nails, held a pink washcloth toward her. It was the washcloth from her bathroom. He’d probably gone through everything, touching all of her things. Everything was contaminated now.
There was no way she could take the washcloth. Not from his hand.
“Fine,” he muttered, tossing the washcloth on the table. “Do it yourself.”
Pissy, he stomped off to sit in one of the captain’s chairs at the front of the trailer.
The reality of Hoyt being in this previously Hoytless place was shocking.
She forced herself to look at him. Really look at him.
He was a big man. Over six feet tall, and he used to rodeo when he was younger so his legs and arms and chest were thick with muscle. He had white blond hair that made his eyebrows and eyelashes nearly invisible, which gave his face a terrible expressionlessness. A vacancy. She’d never ever been able to tell what he was thinking.
Sincerity looked like deceit. Anger looked like forgiveness.
She used to think he was calm. Other people did too; at the very beginning of their marriage that’s what everyone said about him.
He’s so steady, they’d said. And she’d clung to that. With both hands and all her fear after Mom died. She’d clung to the version of him she wanted to believe in.
But it was a lie. Everything about him was a lie.
And Annie had been a fool.
That he was so totally the same, wearing what he always wore—jeans, his brown cowboy boots and the dark blue western shirt with the pearl snaps, his bone-handled knife in the sheath on his belt—made it even more surreal.
New place. Same nightmare.
Her missing phone was balanced on his knee. He’d taken it from her, gone through her pockets, while she lay unconscious on the floor.
Because he was an animal.
“I’m sorry,” he said with utter and terrifying sincerity. “I know at home, you were scared. What I did…that night in the kitchen?” He said it like she might have forgotten. “It was too much. I understand that.”
An incredulous laugh she could not let out stung her throat. Do you? Do you understand that?
“It won’t happen again. I swear it won’t.”
“How did you find me?” She tried to clear her vision, get her brain to focus.
“Do you believe me?” he asked. “That things will be different?”
No. Not in a million years.
“I believe you,” she lied, putting her heavy, throbbing head in her hand. “Just tell me how you found me.”
“It was actually pretty cool.” He smiled, with what she guessed was modesty, like she was about to be real proud of him. “The Bassett Gazette has this widget thing—that’s what they call them—on their website and it shows a map of the United States and on that map are little pins that track the places where people are logging on to the website. The gal I talked to at the office was real excited about it, said it showed that there were people all over the state reading their newspaper online. And there was this one dot…this one little dot that I started to follow. You know where that dot went?”
Sick to her stomach, she nodded. She thought she’d been so clever.
“It went around in circles for a while. And then it went north to Pennsylvania and then back south. And then it just stayed in Cherokee, North Carolina. Over and over again. Every few days it’d show up. Cherokee, North Carolina. Every week. Once a week. Tuesdays. That’s the day you liked to go shopping.” He said it like he was offering her proof of his affection. A nosegay. A dead bird dropped at her feet from his bloody jaws. “You thought I didn’t notice. But I did. You liked to shop on Tuesdays. So, I drove out here. I saw where you signed in for computer time at the library—Layla McKay. That’s your cousin, right?”
In one of the historical novels she’d read, there was a character who had a falcon. And Annie had loved the descriptions of how the guy flew his falcon and cared for it, the bells and the gloves and the little pieces of meat in a bag attached to his belt. And she’d thought, reading it, how great it would be to control something so barely domesticated. Something so very nearly wild.
But at this moment she realized how the falcon must have felt. So free one minute, wings spread, the world a retreating landscape below. The next, hooded and chained. Captured. Freedom a memory.
“I stayed there for a week, hanging out at the library. The grocery store. Driving by all the motels and…nothing. I heard about this trailer park out here and came out to investigate and I ran into this man, Phil, at a gas station. He told me all about the park. And when I described you, he told me he thought you might be here. You’re like his wife’s friend? I’m afraid Phil doesn’t like you much.”
God, brought down by Phil. How pathetically fitting.
“What do you want?” she asked, unable to pretend any longer.
He looked at her like he was surprised, his mouth gaping open, his translucent eyebrows halfway up his forehead. “I want you to come home,” he said. “I want you to be my wife again.”
“What does that even mean to you, Hoyt? Your wife? You don’t love me—”
He stood up from that chair and she shrank back in her seat.
“I apologized for what happened before you left. I can’t do any more than that. It’s time for you to come home now. You’ve had your fun. People are asking about you and I’m getting tired of the sideways glances. Everyone thinks I’ve done something to you. The police came out to the house two weeks ago. The police, Annie. It’s too much.”
He touched her hand before she could jerk it back. It was worse when he pretended to care. Or maybe he did actually care and he just didn’t know how to do it right.
“We can go back to church.”
Annie blinked up at him, unsure if he’d actually said that, or if she was hearing things.
“Annie? Would you like to go back to church?”
“Yes…of course,” she breathed. Three years ago she would have wept in gratitude. But she was not fooled now. He would let her go to church, once, maybe twice, and he’d find a way to take it away from her all over again.
“And then we’ve got to talk about selling that land to Encro.”
And there it was. That was really why he wanted her home. The land sale to Encro for more windmills. He couldn’t do it without Annie’s approval. That’s why this little scene was happening. “It’s time, don’t you think, that we thought of our future?”
My future is as far away from you as I can get.
“I forgive you for stealing from me, Annie. The money, the gun. It’s forgiven.”
Oh my God.
The gun.
The gun in her bedside table.
Did he have it? Was it still there?
She tried to show him nothing. Not one thing.
“I…I need to change my shirt.” Her spattered and torn sweatshirt was ruined with blood; it would never come clean. She’d had a few shirts like that
at home. Clothes that made their way into the rag bag, or the garbage because the truth of her life was sprayed all over it.
Annie got up on shaky feet, her hand braced on the wall as she walked down the short hallway to the bedroom.
Please. Please be there. Please be there. That gun was her only chance.
She closed the door behind her and then, dizziness and headache aside, she nearly leaped over the bed to the small beside table and yanked open the drawer.
It was empty. Sobbing, she searched it, pulling it all the way out, but everything was gone. The books. The gun. The article about Ben. Everything.
She collapsed against the wall and fell to the floor.
The bedroom door creaked opened and Hoyt stood in the doorway. A blond devil. Her gun, like a toy in his great big palm.
In his other hand were her books. The sticky notes from Dylan. The artifacts of her rebellion. Of her entire life here.
Silent, he tossed the books onto the bed. The article. The notes.
She wanted to gather them up, out of his reach. Out of his sight. But it was too late. Everything she owned he’d ruined with his touch. She tipped her head so she couldn’t see them. Like a child, she thought if she couldn’t see them, they weren’t real.
They never happened.
All she had left was getting out of this.
“Who is Dylan Daniels to you?” he asked.
“No one. I don’t know who he is.” Annie got to her feet without any idea why she was lying when she was doing it so badly. All she knew was that she could not put Dylan in the middle of this nightmare.
“Stop.” He held up the phone, the screen showing all of their text messages. The picture she had sent of her nearly naked body. Her breasts and her tummy, the pale white blur of her thighs.
Annie had been unfaithful to a man who smacked her around over chicken pot pies. Strangled her over windmills. She could not imagine what he would do over adultery.
