Claiming Her_A Romance Collection

by R. R. Banks

  As the truck turned into the emergency lane in front of the airport, I saw that it was Garrett. He was wearing his uniform except for his mask, and as he jumped down off the back of the truck he took his hat off.

  "What are you doing here?" I asked.

  "I'm here to respond to an emergency," he said.

  "What emergency?" I asked.

  "The fact that you might leave without me having a chance to tell you that I'm falling in love with you."

  I heard the gasps rising up out of the crowd around me, but I didn't care who was there. All that mattered to me was that Garrett was standing in front of me. I stepped closer to him.

  "You are?" I asked.

  He nodded.

  "I've been falling in love with you since the first moment I saw you, but I wouldn't let myself believe it. I didn't think that I was capable of love, but you've proven to me that I am. Or at least that I am willing to try with everything that I have, to show you what you mean to me."

  "I'm falling in love with you, too," I told him. "I think that I fell a long time ago."

  He leaned down and kissed me and the crowd behind me cheered. I turned and looked at my parents. They were both beaming, my mother's hands clasped in front of her chest and tears shimmering in my father's eyes.

  "You go on with him," my father said.

  "Are you sure?" I asked.

  My mother nodded.

  "Absolutely," she said. "You go on. You wouldn't have been much fun, anyway. Now we can go rock climbing and explore the caves without you telling us that we are too old."

  I laughed and rushed to hug both of them.

  "We will talk to the program director," my father assured me. "Will let her know that something came up and see what we can do."

  I smiled and nodded.

  "Thank you."

  I turned back to Garrett, but before I could say anything, my father gestured at the fire truck as if he had never seen one.

  "Don't worry, sir," Garrett said, walking toward me. "It was a false alarm."

  He swept me up into his arms and I wrapped my arms around his neck. He turned to me and kissed me deeply as we walked back to the truck. He hopped back on, lowering me to my feet beside him, and we both gripped the ladder as the truck gave cheerful beeps of the horn and headed away from the airport.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Gwendolyn

  The truck brought us back to the fire station and from there we got into Garrett's car. I laughed as I settled into the passenger seat, feeling like we had come full circle, or perhaps even found the place where we should have started in the first place. I glanced over at him and immediately changed my mind.

  No. That was exactly how we were supposed to meet.

  My heart swelled in my chest when we pulled up in front of his house. I had seen it before. I had brought Jason here to get some of his clothes the night that Garrett went into the hospital. But I hadn't been inside. Garrett had never brought me here. Instead, we had always spent our time at my house or going out. Now I felt as though he was literally bringing me into his world. He came around the side of the car and opened the door. He reached for my hand and pulled me out and into his arms. His mouth closed over mine for a kiss and I remembered the first night that we spent together. His hand intertwined with mine as we walked toward the house. Once we were inside he led me into the living room. I looked around at the pieces of furniture that I had helped him choose. It had been difficult trying to visualize the furniture in the space where it would eventually sit when I didn't know what the room looked like, but now that I saw it I knew that we had chosen the perfect pieces.

  We sat down on a plush navy-blue couch and Garrett turned toward me. He reached for my hands and held both of them between us. He looked down at them as if he was trying to come up with the words that he wanted to say, then pulled them up to his mouth and kissed them before settling them back down onto the couch.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "What are you sorry about?" I asked.

  "I'm sorry that I let things get this far without really being honest with you. I might fight fires and pull people out of car wrecks, but other than finding out that I would be raising Jason alone, nothing in my life has ever been as scary as you."

  "Scary?"

  "Until I met you, I didn't think that I had space in my life for another woman. What I went through with my ex-wife was enough to make it so that I couldn't imagine ever trusting another woman. I was far too young to be doing things that I was doing, and I ended up paying the consequences. Not Jason. Having him is the only thing that makes anything that I went through during that time of my life worth it. Having to bring myself to propose to a woman who was barely even a woman, and who I had only known for a few months felt horrible. I didn't want to marry her. I didn't want to feel like my future had already been locked in place when I was barely out of high school, but I felt like it was what I was supposed to do. That's why I joined the military. And that's why I spent every day of my life working as hard as I could to try to provide for them. Apparently, though, all the time that I was spending working, she was spending cozying up with my best friend."

  "I'm so sorry," I said.

  "Even after that happened and I told her to leave, though, I hated myself for it. I hated that that's where it had all ended up."

  "Why?" I asked. "You didn't do anything wrong. It seems like you were the only one in that situation who was actually being an adult. You didn't deserve to be treated that way." I took a breath. "I need to be honest with you, too. I was married. It's been about two years since my divorce. We met each other, dated, we got engaged, got married, broke up, and divorced in a shorter time than that. It was one of the worst experiences of my life, but it was over because I knew that I didn't deserve to be treated the way he treated me."

  I knew that there would come a time, someday, when I would tell him about what I went through with Michael and how it has affected me, but suddenly that felt far away. Suddenly I felt like I could breathe.

  "I wish that I had done it that way," he said. "Looking back on it now, I know that there were so many times during my marriage when I should have just cut my losses and let it be over. But I refused to. I had made a promise to myself and even though I ended up breaking it, I tried as hard as I could not to."

  "What promise?" I asked.

  He looked at me and I saw a flicker of the dark, angry emotion that I had seen in his eyes the one time that I had mentioned his parents. This time, though, it didn't frighten me. It made my heart ache.

  "I promised myself that I was never going to be like my father."

  "Why would you promise yourself that?" I asked.

  Garrett stood up and helped me to my feet.

  "I need to show you something", he said.

  I followed him out of the house and back into the car. He didn't tell me where we were going, and he stayed silent as we drove back through his neighborhood and across town. I could see that his hands were tightening on the steering wheel the longer we drove, and I wondered where he could be bringing me and what it had to do with his father. Finally, he stopped the car and we both climbed out. I looked around and then my eyes fell on an old house that sent a shiver through me. I remembered that house. It had been the stuff of whispers among the older people in Silver Lake when I was younger and then became the source of legends and myths when I was a teenager. I shivered when I looked at it. I remembered the stories that I had heard about it and the bets and dares between the guys, trying to get each other to go inside. I didn't know of anybody who ever actually had.

  I looked at Garrett and saw him staring at the house intensely. Finally, he looked at me.

  "What do you know about this house?" he asked quietly.

  "A woman was murdered here by her ex-husband," I said, remembering that Garrett had only moved here a few months before and might not have heard the stories. "After he killed her, he attacked four other people. The only reason that they survived, and
he wasn't able to get to anyone else was because the police got to him. A neighbor must have seen what he was doing and called."

  Garrett shook his head.

  "No neighbor called," he said. "The man's son ran to the police station."

  "That's right, I remember hearing that. Nobody ever saw him again." I looked at the house again. Even in the sunlight, it looked dark. "Why did you bring me here?"

  "This is where I grew up," he said, "and until I moved back here, I hadn't seen the house since the day I ran out of it and went to the police."

  I felt my breath catch in my throat and my stomach flip over. My body started to tremble.

  "Garrett," I said. "I had no idea."

  "I know", he said. "Nobody does. My name was changed after I left Silver Lake and I didn't keep up with anybody from here. Nobody knows who I am. Jason doesn't even know what happened. I never told him."

  I turned to Garrett and wrapped my arms around him. He leaned down and rested his head on mine. I didn't know what to say to him. I didn't think that there was anything that I could say to him that would mean anything in that moment. I couldn't imagine the memories that he carried and what it felt like to be back here, anonymous and alone. Those were things that he should never have had to deal with at all, but he especially should not have to deal with them alone. I felt like I was seeing inside of him now. I could see what caused the hurt and what had created the harsh walls he put up around himself.

  "You never have to be afraid that you will be like your father," I said.

  "He and my mother got divorced," he said. "I promised myself that I was never going to do that. That was the beginning. I promised myself I would never have a broken marriage and I would never have a child who had to suffer like I did."

  I leaned back and looked into Garrett's eyes.

  "You divorced your wife because she didn't deserve to be married to you anymore and she didn't deserve to be Jason's mother. That doesn't make you like your father. You will never be like your father."

  "I didn't want anybody to know who I was when I came back here. I know the pain and devastation that my father caused this town. I know the way that everyone looked at me. I didn't want to carry that back here with me. And I didn't want you to turn your back on me if you found out."

  I shook my head.

  "That is not who you are, Garrett. You are not your father and you are not what he did. I know who you are." I looked at the gate that led into the front lawn. "Have you been inside?" I asked.

  "No," he said. "I went into the yard, but that's it. I haven't gone back inside since that day."

  "Come on," I said.

  "I don't think I should," he said.

  "Why not? Who owns this house now?"

  "I do," he admitted. "When my father died in prison, everything went to me. I've kept up with it all these years. I don't know why."

  "Then let's go inside," she said. "It's just a house. You don't need to be afraid."

  I took his hand, tightly intertwining our fingers, and led him through the gate in the white picket fence and up the sidewalk to the front porch. I could feel his palm sweating against mine and his breath seemed shallow. I wondered what he was seeing as he stood there, what he was hearing, what he was feeling. I hesitated on the front porch, ready to go back to the car with him if he resisted anymore, but Garrett stood strong.

  "Do you have a key?" I asked.

  "No," he said. "Wait."

  He let go of my hand and went back down the steps. He carefully made his way through an overgrown flower bed and passed a bush that had been planted against the side of the house. I saw him crouch down and use his fingers to dig away some of the dirt at the base of the foundation. He moved away a few small rocks and then dug a little deeper. Finally, he revealed a section of the foundation that appeared to be covered with a thin, flat piece of cement. He moved that aside and reached into the hole it uncovered to pull out a key.

  "I can't believe this is still here," he murmured, more to himself than to me.

  He made his way back out of the flower bed and up onto the porch with me. He showed me the old key.

  "My mother hid this there and told me about it about a year before she died. My father had gotten into the habit of locking us out of the house." He looked at the key in his hand. "I thought it was a game. She was so serious about me never telling anyone where that key was, especially my father, I just thought it was because she wanted to be able to sneak back inside whenever she wanted to. I thought that she wanted to win."

  I took the key gently from his hand.

  "You know what?" I asked. "She just did."

  Chapter Eighteen

  Garrett

  I watched as Gwendolyn put the key in the lock. The lawyer had told me that I should have all the locks in the house changed, but I had never done it. I never thought that I would be standing here again, going inside, and I hadn't seen the point. Now as I watched her shake the key in the time-frozen lock and heard it disengage inside the door, I braced myself for what I would feel when I stepped over that threshold again. The door opened, and Gwendolyn pushed it into the house, stepping back so that I would be the first to enter. She held my hand tightly, giving it a squeeze as I hesitated just outside the door. Finally, I released her hand and stepped inside. I walked through the entryway towards the living room and I felt...

  Nothing.

  I had expected an onslaught of memories. I had expected to be overcome with thoughts and emotions that would take over the second that I was in the space again. I had expected to see it, feel it, hear it, smell it all again. But none of that happened. I stood in the middle of the room and looked around, breathing in air that had been trapped inside for so long while it swirled and blended with the fresher breeze from outside. I could imagine that it was escaping through the open door, pouring outside and bringing with it any lingering memories and moments from inside. Just like Gwendolyn had said, it was just a house.

  The cleaning crew and antique dealers that the lawyer had let into the house, when I refused to come back, had done an incredible job of changing what had once been my home. The floors were now wood where there had been carpeting. The curtains that had hung in the windows had been replaced by simple sheer panels. I looked around and realized just how small it seemed. When I was a child, the house had seemed cavernous. I had felt like the rooms were so big that they could have swallowed me. Now they seemed humble and quiet. There was a layer of years of dust on all the surfaces and I could see the specks dancing in the beam of sunlight that was coming through the front window and splashing across the wood floor. A memory that I had long forgotten suddenly flashed into my mind. I remembered sitting on my mother's lap in a rocking chair in the corner and looking at the sunlight. Even though she kept the house meticulously clean, that day some specks of dust or dirt from some source had found their way into the house and ran out floating through the air, visible only in the beam of sunlight.

  Those are fairies, she had whispered to me. They're special. They came just for you. Go over there and try to catch one. But if you do, don't hold it for long. Give it a kiss and let it go.

  I let out of breath and felt Gwendolyn come stand beside me.

  "Why did you keep this house for so many years, Garrett? Why didn't you just let it go?"

  "I think that I was afraid to have lost everything and for everything to have been taken away from my mother. I never wanted to come back here, but I feel like part of me kept it in remembrance of her."

  Gwendolyn shook her head.

  "That's not what it is," she said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You said that you wanted to keep this house in remembrance of your mother. But if that was really the case, then it would be beautiful. You would never let it look like this. This is a shrine to your father. It's just a house, Garrett. It's just a structure. It did nothing wrong. By being afraid of it and blaming it, you are letting your father's legacy live on. It's time to take that from him."
She looked around. "Which one was your room?" she asked me.

  I walked her down the hallway and through the door into the corner bedroom. The walls were the same shade of blue that they had been, but everything else was gone. I walked over to where my bed had stood. I followed a sudden compulsion and laid down on the floor, looking up at the ceiling like I had when I was a little boy. Getting the same perspective that I had so many years ago only further emphasized how small and unassuming the space really was. I stood up and saw Gwendolyn looking around, her face looking as though she were thinking of something.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "This room would make an amazing office," she said. "This color is so calming. Just another coat and it would be perfect. Add a desk up against the wall. The woodwork is gorgeous. Polish that and make it a focal point. This wall could hold a huge bookcase."

  As she spoke, I felt like I was watching my bedroom fade away and the office of her imagination take its place. I felt something inside me releasing. For the first time, I really realized that this space didn't have to be what it had been. It didn't have to continue to represent the past. It could be something else. I reached down and took Gwendolyn's hand again. We walked back through the house and out the front door. I had just locked the front door and turned to walk down the porch steps when I noticed two people standing at the gate. One was Mr. McCrady. The other was a tiny, wrinkled woman wearing a gray dress and a black shawl over her shoulders. A smile came to my lips. She looked exactly the same.

  I stepped down off the porch and started down the sidewalk.

  "Why it's you," Mr. McCrady said. "I thought I saw somebody out here."

  "Come here," his wife said from beside him. "Let me look at you."