“Where’s your mind, baby?”
“Huh? Oh. Just planning out my day.”
“I’m taking you home and you’re resting. That’s your day.”
“I have other stuff I need to do. I can drive myself home.”
“The hell you are. You can’t drive in your condition.”
“Hector.”
He squeezed her hand. “Tell me what you need. Let me help you.”
“I don’t need—”
He burst up from his seat. “I get it, all right? I know you don’t need my help, maybe you don’t even need me, but I’m helping you. And that’s that.”
He thought she didn’t need him? She needed him too much, that was the problem. She started to tell him so, but he kept on talking.
He was also pacing across the room. “Maybe it was stupid coming here. All I could think about was you last night. Some hospital calls me, tells me you’re hurt. You don’t have your phone, so I can’t call you. My damn car’s in the shop, so I can’t even leave right away. Then, because I am leaving, I have to call in someone to fix the damn freezer because I don’t know what you’ll need, but I figured you’d need me and you might need me for a while, so I called someone else in to finish the job. Then Liz is pissed at me because I explained her boyfriend is a racist asshole, so she wouldn’t speak to me all through the closing shift. Plus, I have to close because Daley was off and I don’t have another assistant manager because I want to hire you for that job, but if I do that, then I won’t get to work the same shifts as you anymore.”
Whhaaaattttt?
“So, all that means I leave after we close when I’m exhausted and my legs hurt, but all I can fucking think about is you hurt somewhere alone without anyone to help you.”
Wow. He did that for her. All of that for her.
Wait. If his legs were hurting, why was he pacing? “Maybe you should sit—”
He whirled to face her. “But none of my shit matters because you’re the only one who matters right now. So, I get it. You don’t want me. Fine. I’m into you, but that doesn’t matter. Getting you healthy and keeping you safe is what’s important right now. So, that’s what I’m gonna fucking do. And you’re gonna fucking let me. And then I’ll be out of your life, romantically anyway. Okay?”
I’m into you.
Getting you healthy and keeping you safe is what’s important right now.
You’re the only one who matters.
Holy shit.
What did she say to that?
When she didn’t say anything fast enough, his face turned ravaged—ravaged—and he turned towards the door.
He couldn’t leave, she couldn’t let him leave.
She tamped down the growing panic that increased with each step he took, summoned up every bit of energy she had and cried out to him. “No, wait!”
He stopped but didn’t face her.
Her breathing was labored, but she kept going. “Come here.”
He didn’t move.
“Please?”
He rubbed a hand over his face and walked over to her. Now that she was paying closer attention, she noticed his limp was pretty pronounced. He should be taking it easy, not running around all night after her.
She reached for him, her hand outstretched. He was too far away for her to meet him without sitting up further, which would put a strain on her ribs. “Come closer. Give me your hand.”
He took a moment, then did as she asked. When he was close enough, she grabbed his hand and drew him nearer.
She kept her eyes locked on his as she lifted his hand to her lips. The skin on the back was surprisingly soft. She hoped her chapped lips didn’t feel scratchy to him.
She’d never done this before. Her heart was racing, and her voice trembled slightly, giving away her nerves. “Sit down.”
His eyes were full of some emotion she couldn’t name. Eventually, he sat down with a sigh.
Their hips were touching. Hers were underneath the thin hospital blanket, and his were in his pants, but it still counted in her book. “Thank you.”
His head jerked back.
“That was the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me. I mean, you sort of yelled it, but you also sort of spoke it. And no one’s ever really cared if I was hurt or needed help or needed anything, really, so I don’t know how to act because this is all new to me. And you basically tell me that you’ve been up all night running around and you’re in pain because of me, which isn’t nice but kind of is, which is really weird and makes me feel more nice but also sad you’re in pain and—”
His fingers came up to her lips. “I’d kiss you quiet, baby, but I don’t think your lips can take it right now.”
“Yes, they can.” Her eyes widened as she realized she’d said that out loud. Shit!
He smirked. His smirk was wonky like his smile, which meant it was cute like his smile but also annoying at the same time.
He shifted up the bed. His fingers fell away and his hands went into the mattress on either side of her torso. He leaned forward a little—he didn’t have to lean far because the bed was still in a reclining position—and pressed his forehead against hers.
“I like what you just said, Amelia.”
His nose was brushing hers and she liked it. A lot. Be brave, Millie. “I…I like you, Hector.”
He smiled, and one of his hands moved to caress the dip in her waist. “I’m glad. I’m sorry for yelling. You don’t need that. Guess I forget sometimes that you’re new to this, too. New to having someone that cares about you, wants to help you.”
He hadn’t always had someone? She wondered again about his family. “We’ll figure it out together then.”
His hand squeezed her waist, making her feel self-conscious about all the extra flesh near said-waist.
She started shifting in the bed. “Maybe—”
He drew back. “Shit, baby. Sorry. Did I hurt you? Not that this is an excuse, but I just couldn’t help myself. You’re just…so…irresistible.”
That was unexpected. “I am?”
“Mmm-hmm.” His voice was all gruff and low, and she felt the rumble of his voice through her entire body.
“Maybe another time, when you aren’t in a hospital bed, but are in a different kind of bed with me, I’ll explain the many things I like about your body.”
Another rumble tore through her body, this one only in a few very specific parts.
Wow.
He sat back and cleared his throat, suddenly all business. “Now, you needed to do some things today?”
Things? She didn’t have anything to do except imagine herself in bed with Hector and—
“Baby? What things did you need to do?”
“What? Oh! Um, things. Right.” Things. There were things…her mother!
She’d never told anyone about her mother before. “Um.”
“Babe? Remember what I said about feeling safe with me? You don’t want to tell me, fine, but you’re not driving anywhere today. I’m taking you, even if you don’t tell me what you’re doing.”
She sighed, then winced as the sigh hurt her ribs. “I need to get back to Masillia.”
“Okay.”
“I need to, um, visit my mother.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Okay. Where’s she live?”
She fiddled with the edge of her blanket, her eyes focused on a loose thread and definitely not on him. “Lowood. It’s a nursing home.”
His voice was more subdued now. “Okay, baby. She been in there long?”
“A while.”
“She’s sick?”
She nodded. “She doesn’t…she hasn’t recognized me for a long time—years, I mean—but the doctors say it won’t be much longer now. I was supposed to go yesterday, but…”
He didn’t say anything for several moments and she peeked up at him. His jaw was hard, and his eyes slit in anger. Whether that was because of what happened to her yesterday or her situation with her mother, she wasn’t sure.
&
nbsp; “How long’s she been this bad?”
She shrugged, another move which seemed to annoy her ribs. Was she ever going to be able to move without her ribs hurting worse? “I’ve gotten calls like this a bunch of times over the past year, maybe a little longer. Always after she’s had a bad night. It’s just hard to know when a call might be the last one, so I try to go.”
“She doesn’t know you anymore, baby?”
She shook her head.
“That’s tough. I’m sorry.” His hand reached out to hold hers and gave it a squeeze.
“Thanks.”
“I hesitate to bring this up, but you and Piers share the same mom?”
“No, we…”
Suddenly, yesterday came flooding back and she gripped Hector’s hand with a vengeance.
Her father! Oh God.
“Oh God.”
“Baby, what is it?”
She was staring straight ahead, her breath coming shorter, making her ribs send sharp, stabbing pains into her body.
“Babe! Look at me.”
She didn’t move.
He used his free hand to hold her face and turn it. “Lock eyes with me, babe. You’re safe. That’s it. Slow down your breathing. That’s it.”
His eyes were melty again. Rich, dark pools of chocolate she wanted to drown in forever.
When she was finally calm again, he spoke. “Talk to me, babe. Tell me what happened.”
“It’s my—I just remembered. When you asked, I remembered. Piers and I share the same father. Yesterday, my father was there.”
His vengeance-vibe filled the room. “What?” he clipped out.
Her voice was a whisper. “At the attack. I think my father was there.”
He cursed under his breath. “You tell the cops?”
“Last night, when they came to get my statement.”
“You see your father a lot?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t seen him since I was eight.” She’d never forget that last visit, nor the events that followed.
“He never came by the old pub when Piers owned it?”
“No. At least not that I knew. He could have gone by when I wasn’t working, though.”
He brought their joined hands to his lips and kissed her fingers. “I’m sorry, baby. It was just you and your ma since you were eight?”
Oh, geez. She’d have to tell him now. He’d said to trust him, but how much bad news about her could he take before he decided enough was enough? “Um, no. Not exactly.”
“What exactly?”
“Could we talk about this later?” Meaning never.
“Your ‘later’ means you don’t want to talk about it. What did I say about being safe with me?”
Be brave again, Millie. “Could I have some water first?”
He cocked his head to the side with a ‘really?’ face.
“I’m not stalling,” she defended herself. “It’s just not easy to talk about.”
His face went gentle, and he gave her a little smile. “All right.”
He let go to pour her some water, handed it to her, then sat right back down, this time closer than before. Since one of her hands was in a cast and the other was holding the plastic cup, he didn’t reach for her again. Instead, he put one hand on her thigh—it was on top of the blanket, but it still counted—and rubbed gently.
It was really hard to focus with his hand there, but since it felt really nice—in a variety of ways—she was able to.
She cleared her throat. “So, um, okay.” She took a little breath. “Okay.”
Where to start? Maybe with her father. “I never really knew my father. He didn’t live with us. I only have a few memories of him visiting us. None of these are very good memories because my mother was always sobbing for days after he left.”
Hector gave her leg a squeeze.
“I didn’t figure it out until I was older—at eight, what do you really understand about grown-up stuff?—but he was married, and my mom was his mistress. Or one of his mistresses. I remember a fight they had once. She was accusing him of not living up to his promises to be with us, and he basically told her that she was just one of his ‘whores’. That’s what he called her. At the time, I didn’t know what it meant but I could tell it wasn’t good.”
“Baby.”
She took a drink of water. Here was the hard part. “It was after that conversation that everything unraveled. He said he was never coming back and that she could kiss his financial support goodbye. I don’t know how much he was giving, but we never had a lot. I was already on my own a lot because my mother was working all the time and couldn’t afford after-school care.”
His voice was full of sympathy. “On your own? At eight?”
She nodded. “I don’t remember when I started. Five? Six? It’s all a blur.”
Another leg squeeze.
“Anyway, my mother kept thinking he’d come back. It’s all she’d talk about. That I was his baby and it didn’t matter if he had babies with anyone else, that he’d still come back to her. But he never did.”
She took a deep breath, the pain in her ribs only feeding the pain in her words. “That’s when my mother decided to get rid of me.”
This time, he removed the cup from her hand, set it down, and gripped her hand in a fierce hold. “Amelia.”
“It’s okay. I’m…okay. My mother basically decided that if I wasn’t enough to keep my father around, then there was no use to keeping me at all. I don’t know why. I never could understand why. Looking back, maybe I thought things were better than they were. I remember being happy with my mother.” She remembered the now-shattered mug she’d made in school for her mother. It had been a lie, a delusion she’d fed herself. “For a long time, I thought I’d done something wrong and that’s why she’d gotten rid of me.”
Hector immediately chimed in. “You didn’t.”
“I know that in my head. Most of the time. Anyway, she gave me up and took off. At that age, I knew I’d never get adopted and I didn’t. I just went from foster home to foster home until I was eighteen. I only saw my mother a few times as a teenager, when she’d come back in town and want to meet with me. Only to decide five minutes in that she didn’t want to see me anymore.”
She squeezed his hand tight for the next part. “I never figured out where my mother went until I saw her at my graduation. She actually showed up, and I was so excited. I thought she’d come to see me, and that she’d decided to be a part of my life again now that I wouldn’t be as much of a burden to her.”
“You’re not a burden.”
The fierceness in his voice made her head jerk back. “What?”
“You’re not a burden. You weren’t at eight years old, you weren’t at eighteen, and you’re not one now, either. Got that?”
“Hector—”
“Don’t you think I’ve had those same thoughts? That I’m a burden because I don’t have two working legs?”
Outrage made her sit up and she ignored her ribs protesting the action. “You’re not a burden! And you have two legs. They’re just…man-made. But they work perfectly fine.”
His face relaxed into a grin. “Baby, what do you think I’ve just been telling you?”
The same thing. He’d been telling her the exact same thing.
“Neither of us are burdens, no matter what the fuck anyone says. Anyone who says or treats you like a burden is not someone you need in your life. Got me? I know it can take a while for that concept to get through, and I’ll help you get there if you need it. All right?”
“I got you.”
“Good.”
“But it’s not that simple.”
His voice wasn’t hard, wasn’t angry. “I know it’s not. I do, baby. Now, tell me why it’s not that simple for you.”
He understood. Why was she constantly surprised when they had more and more in common? She never thought anyone would understand this.
“Well, my mother showed up at graduation but made a huge sce
ne. She said she’d found my half-siblings and they were all better than me, so it was my fault my father left us.”
Hector pursed his lips. “You know that’s not true.”
“I know now. Back then, well, she was my mother. I missed her. She was the only family I’d ever known. I never knew my grandparents—any of them—so she was it. I mean, the foster families I had were all right, but they cared more about the check they got for being my foster parents than for ever being any kind of parent to me. I guess that’s why I did it.”
He must have heard the apprehension in my voice. “Did what?”
“Looked for my siblings. Guess who I found first?”
“Amelia.”
“My mother took off after graduation. I never even found out how she knew I was graduating or which school I even went to, but that was it. In her yelling at me, she gave me a clue that eventually led me to Piers and the Royal Court.”
She took another breath. “Piers didn’t believe me at first, not until we did a DNA test that proved it. After that, he was nice in the beginning, if you can believe it. Offered me a job waitressing when I said I wasn’t going to college until I saved up more money. You can guess where things went from there.”
He kissed her hand and kept it tight in his. “Baby, know that I am not judging you by asking this, I just want to know. When he started to get abusive, why didn’t you leave?”
“Do you have family?”
He blinked. “Uh, yeah. Sort of.”
She wouldn’t delve into the ‘sort of’ right now. “He was my only family. My father didn’t want me. My mother didn’t want me because my father didn’t want me. Piers seemed to want me, if only to have someone to push around.”
A realization hit her like a sharp flash of lightning, causing her heart to race and her voice to come out all breathy, as if she’d been running a mile. “Until you, I didn’t know what it meant for someone to really want you. When you’ve never seen what that means or what that feels like, you think anyone—even someone like Piers—is better than nothing. When you’re lonely and alone…you’ll do anything to have someone care, even a little, even if you’re just convincing yourself they care in your head. It’s why I stayed so long.”
“You quit.”
Rush_Hector & Millie Page 16
