Before That Night: Unfinished Love Series: Caine & Addison, Book 1

by Violet Duke

  “David. Stop it. If you don’t leave, I’m going to call the police.” She held up her phone between them.

  A look of utter confusion blanketed his expression. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m just trying to help. You and I both know that a van is no place for kids to be sleeping every night.”

  That was a threat. Shit. She snapped her mouth shut and waited to see what cards he would show next.

  “Actually,” his eyes widened as if he just had a brilliant idea, “why don’t you and the kids come live with me? My house isn’t that far from here. The kids can stay in the spare room. They’ll be right down the hall from our room.”

  For the first time in her life, Addison was starting to feel truly terrified. Like she’d swum out into a riptide she couldn’t escape. “David,” she tried to keep the fear out of her voice as she mollified him, “that’s a real generous offer, but the kids and I are just fine. This is temporary. We’ll be back in our apartment in no time.”

  His eyes hardened. “I don’t like when you lie to me, Addison. I know you’ve had to lie to everyone to keep this little secret of yours going for so long, but you and I both know that I’m not just anyone. You can trust me.”

  He was crazy. He really was crazy, she could see it clear as day now. She went back to remaining silent, all the while looking for an opening where she could run.

  “All this time,” he said softly, sympathetically again. “I know now why you could never go out with me. It’s those kids. A girl your age shouldn’t have to be saddled down with two kids to support.” He shook his head sadly. “You’ve had such a big burden on your shoulders for so long. You’re such a good person to take on a responsibility like that. Sacrifice your whole life, and your happiness for those kids.”

  At that point, Addison stopped caring about her own safety. The way he kept emphasizing kids wasn’t sitting right with her. Her eyes flashed over to door to the kitchen, and the door out to the back just beyond that. If she ran for the kitchen first, she could grab a bunch of knives as weapons. If she didn’t wound him considerably first, he’d be able to catch her and the kids before they even got a chance to run.

  David took a step closer to her and put a heavy, unrelenting hand on her elbow. “Like I said, sweetie, I just want to help. Help take that burden off of you. So you can just relax a bit and enjoy life again.”

  She waited for her opening, readied her feet to start kicking and then running.

  Suddenly, the blaring siren of a police squad car pierced the air.

  A second later, the front door was yanked open so hard she was surprised it was still on its hinges. “Get the hell away from her.”

  Thank God.

  Caine.

  He braced open the door with his foot, leaving one hand palm up in her direction, while the other remained hovered over the gun at his hip. His eyes never left David’s for even a second. “Addison, come on outside, while this gentleman and I have a little chat.”

  David shot Caine a death-glare, dark and ugly. “We were just having a conversation.”

  “Well, she doesn’t look to be a willing participant in this conversation.” Jaw grit tight, Caine pointed at the David’s hand, which was now digging painfully into her elbow.

  David released her then. “You can’t arrest me for just touching her arm.”

  “You’re right. I can’t.” Caine held his hand out to her again. “Addison, come out here and go stand by my car.”

  She did exactly as he instructed.

  With one hand still hovering over his gun, Caine reached up to speak into the radio on his shoulder.

  Addison was standing behind the driver’s side door, which Caine had left open before running in to her rescue. She couldn’t make out everything he was saying, partly because all the blood in her body seemed to be rushing into her ears like crashing waves. But she could hear that he was talking to dispatch.

  A second later, David scurried out of the diner.

  And kept on walking until he rounded the corner and disappeared.

  Caine rushed to her side, all the while, keeping one eye in the direction David had rushed off in. “Sweetheart, are you okay?” He put a gentle hand on her arm, but didn’t touch her more than that. Funny how that one touch, so similar to David’s just minutes prior, felt like night and day. She collapsed against his chest, and he immediately squeezed her tight. “It’s okay now. Everything’s alright.”

  So saying, his hand was still hovering over his gun.

  While she kept clinging to him, he spoke into his radio again and exchanged a few sentences with dispatch that washed over her like the tide. Caine was here. David was gone and Caine was here.

  That’s all her brain needed to process at the moment.

  When two more squad cars showed up not even a minute later, she finally untangled her arms from Caine so he could do his job.

  But he didn’t let go of her.

  Secretly thankful for that, she dropped her head back down to his chest, right over his heart. He kept her tucked against his side like it was the most natural thing in the world for him to be briefing two other officers with her stuck to his side like a jellyfish.

  Marco, probably her next favorite officer after Caine, drove off in the direction that David had walked off in, while Peter, a rookie cop she didn’t know that well went back to his squad car while talking with dispatch.

  “Honey, are you able to hear me now?”

  How did he know? She looked up at him and repeated her question aloud.

  He gazed down at her worriedly. “Because I’ve been there. Adrenaline crash can mess with your senses.” Rubbing his hands down her arms to warm her up, he pressed his lips to her forehead before wrapping her up in a grizzly bear hug. “You scared the hell out of me tonight, woman.”

  “Thank you.”

  Oh great. So apparently, adrenaline crash also stole her ability to give logical replies in a conversation.

  And now she felt like giggling. What the heck?

  His arms wrapped around her even tighter. “Don’t worry, it’ll pass.” He peppered another few kisses across her temple.

  Eventually, she stopped shaking, after she realized she’d been shaking to begin with. “Thank you for saving me,” she finally managed.

  “I’m just glad I was late coming back from my last call of the night. If I hadn’t happened to see the sillouette of you two through the glass door—”

  This time, the shudder was hitting his large frame. “Honey, you need to tell me everything that happened here tonight. Why was that man harassing you?”

  Oh God. Could she do it?

  Could she actually tell him everything?

  CHAPTER TEN

  SHE WAS HIDING something from him.

  Caine threw his wet towel back up on the hook behind his bathroom door and slid on a pair of old workout sweats to go a few rounds with the heavy bag. He needed to hit something. Badly.

  As he pounded out his frustrations for a good solid hour, his mind kept racing with all the possible things Addison could be keeping from him.

  He came up with nothing.

  Well, for one fleeting moment, he’d thought maybe David might’ve been her ex-husband or something. But the way the creep had been staring at Addison had been proof positive that he viewed her through a looking glass as a challenge, an unreachable obsession.

  Either that, or the man was a complete psychopath with the emotional capacity of a sea slug. The giveaway? The dead eyes. That was the only way Caine could explain it. No affection or hatred. No true human emotions at all. Just sickly intense desire sparking in the center of a nothing-filled void.

  No way would Addison have ever had anything to do with a man like that.

  So that returned Caine back to square one. He couldn’t think of a single thing she could be hiding. She was always so candid—with him at least—and her life as simple and transparent as his was as far as he could tell.

  Still, he knew in his gut there was more she si
mply wasn’t telling him.

  After jumping in another shower, he called up Joe at the diner to get Shirley’s number. Shirley confirmed that this David guy had asked Addison out dozens of times in the past, and had been acting stranger than usual last night.

  Hearing that last bit had made Caine crazy. He hated knowing that she’d already felt uneasy before David had returned. That she’d braved it alone without even thinking to ask for help.

  The woman was too independent for her own good.

  As much as he admired that, it also scared the hell out of him. A thousand thoughts of what could’ve happened to her if he hadn’t intervened had assailed him since he’d escorted her back to Lakeview Ridge. He hadn’t even been able to leave the gated entrance until he saw that big breadbox on wheels she drove disappear halfway down the golf course.

  At least she’d agreed to file the restraining order against David last night, which already should’ve been served to him today. That was the first step they needed to be able to arrest him. Luckily, the guy had paid his meal with a credit card, which had helped them find his address, and also his existing priors.

  David’s record wasn’t extensive, but it was enough to make all of Caine’s grim what-ifs worsen tenfold.

  A date rape charge back in college that never got prosecuted—surprise, surprise—and then another a few years back where the victim was under the influence of something they lacked the evidence to prove. Apparently, that one got settled out of court. And then most recently, harassment and assault charges—again filed by a woman—that did end up making it all the way to sentencing. He’d served thirty days in jail…not long before he’d moved to Creek Hills and first started coming to Joe’s Diner, apparently.

  After seeing the charges, Caine had wanted nothing more than to throw Addison over his shoulder and hide her away under twenty-four hour surveillance, guarded by the best fighter he knew in Arizona, aka his foster sister Lia whose lifetime of martial arts training had armed her with the chops to be not just good, but scary-ass good.

  But he knew Addison would hate that. He knew his girl would want to fight instead of hide.

  When she’d told him last night about the plan she’d been concocting to grab some knives from the kitchen to go on the offensive with David before Caine had showed up, he’d made a remark that it was clear her ‘fight’ instincts were stronger than her ‘flight’ ones.

  And that’s when she’d replied: “I think a person’s response to a threat to his or her own survival could be totally opposite from their response to a threat to the survival of a loved one.” Clouds had darkened her eyes for a beat before she’d added, “I think sometimes, your fear for someone you love can give you more strength…strength to fight when you would normally run. And the strength to run when you would normally fight.”

  At the time, he hadn’t fully understood all that she was saying since half didn’t seem to apply. Sometimes, adrenaline made folks super philosophical. But the more jittery revelations she started to reveal as her adrenaline crash ebbed away, the more he’d started to wonder if she wasn’t talking about things from her past.

  She confirmed it a little while later when she was surveying the bruises David had left on her arm.

  “I’ve never had bruises like this before,” she’d said quietly. “My mom never hit me or anything like that, but the scars she’s left on my heart over the years, I’m sure one day some shrink will tell me that I’m irreversibly messed up because of it.” Caine had pulled her into his arms then, and just held her silently while she gave him a small glimpse into the hell she’d lived through as a kid.

  “Whenever my mom was really mad at me—like when I wet the bed by accident once because I’d been scared of a drugged-out man who had fallen on top of me during one of her parties—that’s when she’d throw back in my face how it was all my fault, how everything that happened to me and to her was my fault because the life she was forced to lead was all the result of my having been born in the first place. I can’t even remember how many times she’s shouted at me that the reason why the love of her life left her was because I came along. That I stole the cushy life she would’ve had with her soulmate and the kids that she did want one day…and that I should be thanking her every day that she didn’t just abort me like she’d wanted to all along.”

  “At least with Tanner and Kylie—whose father she did know the identity of—she only made them feel invisible, a burden at best, and at worst, a failure for not being enough to get him to stay. I was unwanted, unwelcome from the day I’d been conceived, and I’d come to terms with that, but I didn’t want my half-brother and half-sister to ever feel the way I did. So I made sure to take the blame and brunt for everything if they’d ever accidentally break a glass or spill the milk…in the hopes that she’d show them the love she never showed me...and kindness, if she could spare it.”

  Hearing what she’d gone through growing up had horrified him. And the fact that these were just the things she wasn’t hiding from him flat-out terrified him.

  He didn’t know all her secrets yet, but as sure as he was that hell was hot and the universe sometimes cruel, he knew that if anything, anything like that ever happened to her again, vengeance would be the least violent thing he’d do to get back at the universe.

  And if he ever lost her? Nothing would stop him from earning his broken soul a place in hell.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CAINE GROWLED IN FRUSTRATION as he listened to Addison tell him she was going to take the kids to a hotel until this all blew over, to keep her Aunt Bernadette out of it.

  “You’re lying to me.”

  She paused for a long moment, before whispering, “Yes.” After which, she added softly, “It’s not easy for me. To lie to you. I promise you that, Caine.”

  Damn her and her sweetness.

  With a rough sigh, he again found himself at a crossroads between wanting to curse aloud over the woman’s freaking independent streak and drag her back to his cave to hold and cherish her even more so because of it.

  “Where are you right now?”

  “I’m waiting for Tanner and Kylie to get out of school.”

  He could tell, she wasn’t making that one up. “Do you want me there? I could call in a favor and have a squad car nearby if it’ll make you feel better.”

  “No.”

  Never had a no sounded so much like a yes. “You’re a lot of work, you know that right?” he chided gently.

  Her quiet chuckle was the only acknowledgement she gave that she maybe thought he had a valid point.

  “Are you going to work at the diner tonight?”

  She hesitated again, before finally admitting, “Yes.”

  At least she didn’t lie about that. Not that he liked hearing she wasn’t going to turtle up somewhere he could keep her safe. Exhaling a pent-up lung full of male frustration, he told—not asked—her, “I’m on the four to midnight shift again so I’ll stop by when you start your shift to take another look around. If you spot David before then, you call 911. Then you call me. You hear? He’ll be violating the restraining order we filed so we’ll be able to arrest him.” His voice hardened to brook no argument. “Swear to me, Addison. If you see him, you’ll call 911 and then call me.”

  Another long pause. Then a slow: “I promise.”

  He’d heard the struggle in her voice as clearly as he’d heard the acceptance. “One day,” he rumbled quietly. “One day, you’re going to trust me enough with your secrets…when you finally figure out that I’m not going anywhere, and that I can be every bit as patient and stubborn as you are.”

  This time, there was no pause when she replied to his affectionate, albeit slightly ornery vow. “Tonight.”

  He froze, and held his tongue so she could finish saying what he hoped she was saying.

  “I’ll tell you everything tonight, Caine.”

  “I’m holding you to that.” He glanced at the caller ID photo of her on his screen. “Dammit, I hate that
I can’t kiss you right now, sweetheart.”

  “Me too,” she breathed raggedly.

  For as much as her lies drove him crazy, her truths…they could steal the floor out from under him.

  He took in a lungful of oxygen to stop himself from putting an APB out on her butt right that instant. “I’ll see you at four-thirty. You can tell me then whatever that busy brain of yours is planning on how to deal with David. And we’ll save your secrets for after my shift. Something tells me I’m going to need to not be in uniform when you do.”

  She neither confirmed nor denied his educated guess.

  But she did ask him to stay on the phone for a bit longer while she waited for the kids to finish school.

  By the time he hung up the phone, he knew a little more about the Addison that no one else knew, and he felt like he was holding a small gift in the palm of his hand—something that she didn’t give to very many people.

  Just a tiny bit of her trust.

  And it humbled him.

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, even though he was the one with the gun and badge, Caine felt utterly defenseless as he dropped one knee down to the ground inside of Joe’s Diner.

  As sweet little Kylie hugged the heck out of him.

  “Thank you for saving Addison, Caine,” she said gravely, her voice far too old for her young age. “We’ve been hearing Shirley and Joe talkin’ ‘bout what happened.”

  The tight, shaky teenage hand gripping his arm in a silent echo of thanks was another arrow to his chest that reminded him just how much he cared about these two kids, and their big sister. “I just gave Addison a little assist, pumpkin. That sister of yours was getting ready to whup that creep’s a—err, butt.”

  Both Kylie and Tanner’s twin expressions of grim wariness and fierce awareness of the situation—so much like the one their sister had worn last night after David ran off—burrowed another hole into his heart.

  God, these kids were incredible. Just like their sister.