by Cara Colter
If falling in love meant feeling gloriously alive every minute you spent together, then yes. If falling in love meant noticing a person’s eyes were the exact color of silver of moonlight on water, yes. If falling in love was living for an accidental brush of a hand, yes.
If falling in love made the most ordinary things—coffee in the morning, the phone ringing and his voice being on the other end—extraordinary, then yes.
She glanced up to see him standing in her office doorway, looking at her. Something in his face made a shiver go up and down her spine.
“Tomorrow’s the big day,” she said, smiling at him.
But he didn’t smile back.
“Molly, I need to show you something.”
There was something grim about him that stopped the smile on her lips. He ushered her outside to a waiting cab, and gave the driver an address she didn’t recognize.
But somehow her gut told her they were going somewhere she did not want to go.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HOUSTON knew something that Molly didn’t. Their time together was ticking down. Only Houston was so aware now that the week he had given himself didn’t seem like enough. He was greedy. He wanted more. A woman like her made a man feel as if he could never get enough of her. Never.
Giving himself that week had made him feel like a man who had been told he only had a week to live: on fire with life, intensely engaged, as awake as he had ever been.
But there was that shadow, too. A feeling of foreboding from knowing that thing that she didn’t. Nothing good ever lasted.
He realized the thought of not seeing her was like putting away the sun, turning his world, for all its accomplishments, for all he had acquired, back into a gray and dreary space, not unlike this neighborhood they were now entering.
He was not sure when he had decided to take this chance, only that he had, and now he was committed to it, even though his spirits sank as they got closer to the place that he had called home, and that somehow, he had never left behind. This was the biggest chance of his life.
What if he let her know the truth of him? All of it?
“I want to show you something,” he said to her again as the cab slowed and then stopped in front of the address he had given the driver. He helped her out of it. She was, he knew, used to tough neighborhoods. But there were certain places even the saints of Second Chances feared to go.
“This is Clinton,” he said, watching her face. “They don’t call it Hell’s Kitchen anymore.”
The cab drove away, eager to be out of this part of town.
“You’ve found us a new project?” she asked. She had the good sense to frown at the cab leaving.
Maybe a project so challenging even Molly would not want to take it on.
“Not exactly. This is where I grew up.”
“This building?”
He scanned her face for signs of reaction. He was aware pity felt as though it would kill him. But there was no sign of pity in her face, just the dawning of something else, as if she knew better than him why he would bring her here.
Why had he? A test.
“Yes. I want to show you something else.” He walked her down the street. “This didn’t used to be a liquor store,” he told her quietly. “It used to be a bank.”
She waited, and he could tell she knew something was coming, something big. And that she wanted it to come. Maybe had waited for this. He plunged on, even while part of him wanted to back away from this.
“When I was fourteen my dad lost his job. Again. My mother was her normal sympathetic self, screaming at him he was a loser, threatening to trade up to someone with more promise.”
Again, he scanned her face. If that look came across it, the drowned kitten look, like he needed rescuing by her, they were out of here.
“He took a gun, and he came down here and he held that gun to the teller’s nose and he took all the money that poor frightened woman could stuff into a bag. On his way out, a man tried to stop him. My father shot him. Thankfully he didn’t kill him.
“He went to jail. Within a week my mother had traded up as promised. I never saw her again.”
“But what happened to you?” Molly whispered.
“I became the kind of bitter man who doesn’t trust anyone or anything.”
“Houston, that’s not true,” she said firmly. “That’s not even close to true.”
He remembered the first day he had met her, when he had talked about being hungry and out of work and not having a place to live, had talked about it generically but her eyes had still been on his face, knowing.
“What is true then?” he asked her roughly. What if she really knew? He was aware of holding his breath, as if he had waited his whole life to find out.
Her eyes were the clearest shade of green he had ever seen as she gazed at him. A small smile touched her lips, and she took a step toward him, placed her hand on his chest, her palm flat, the strength of her knowing radiating from her touch.
“This is true,” she whispered. “Your heart.”
And the strangest thing was that he believed her. That somewhere in him, safe from the chaos, his heart had beat true and strong.
Whole.
Waiting.
“Did you think this would change how I feel about you?” she asked softly.
It was a major distraction. How did she feel about him?
“I always knew there was something about you that made you stronger than most people,” she said.
He suddenly knew why he was here. He was asking her, are you willing to take a chance on me? And it was only fair that she knew the whole story before she made that decision. Still, he made one last ditch effort to convince her she might be making a mistake.
“There’s nothing romantic about growing up like this, Molly. Maybe it makes you strong. Or maybe just hard. I have scars that might never heal.”
“Like the one on your nose?”
“That’s the one that shows.”
“I think love can heal anything,” she said quietly, and somehow it felt as if she had just told him how she felt about him, after all.
Something felt tight in his chest. She was the one who believed in miracles. And standing here at the heart of Clinton, seeing the look in her eyes, it occurred to him that maybe he did, too.
“There’s something else you should know,” he said stubbornly. Tell her all of it.
“What’s that?” she said, and she was looking at him as if not a single thing he could ever do or say could frighten her away from him.
Houston hesitated, searching for the words, framing them in his mind.
My father’s getting out of prison. I don’t know what to do. Somehow I feel that you’ll know what to do, if I let you into my world. Did she want to come into this?
He drank her in, felt her hand still on his heart. The softness in her face, the utter desire to love him, could make a man take a sledgehammer to his own defenses, knock them down, not be worried about what got out. Wanting to let something else in. Wanting to let in what he saw in her eyes when she looked at him.
A place where a man could rest, and be lonely no more. A place where a man could feel cared about. A place where he could lay down his weapons and fight no more. A place where he could be seen. And known. For who he was. All of it. She would want him to answer that letter from his father. He knew a man who was going to be worthy of loving her would be able to do that.
Would be able to believe that love could heal all things, just as she had said.
For a moment he was completely lost in thought, the look in her eyes that believed him to be a better man than Houston Whitford had ever believed himself to be. A man could rise up to meet that expectation, a man could live in the place that he found himself. Funny, that he would come this close to heaven in Clinton.
Suddenly the hair on the back of his neck went up. He was aware of something trying to penetrate the light that was beginning to pierce his darkness. And then he realized he wa
s not free from darkness. This world held a darkness of its own, not so easy to escape, and he foolishly had brought her here.
They weren’t alone on this street. The hair rising on the back of his neck, an instinctual residue from his days here, let him know they were being watched.
He glanced over Molly’s shoulder, moved away from her hand still covering his heart. With the focused stare of a predator, a man in a blue ball cap nearly lost in the shadow of the liquor store’s doorway was watching them. He glanced away as soon as Houston spotted him.
What had Houston been thinking bringing her here? Flashing his watch and his custom suit like a neon invitation. He knew better than that! He should have known better than that.
That man pushed himself off the wall, shuffled by them, eyed Houston’s watch, scanned his face.
Houston absorbed the details. The man was huge, at least an inch taller than Houston, and no doubt outweighed him by a good fifty pounds. He had rings on his hand, a T-shirt that said Jay on it, in huge letters. His face was wily, lined with hardness.
“What’s going on?” Molly asked, seeing the change in Houston’s face. She glanced at the man, back at him.
But Houston didn’t answer, preparing himself, his instincts on red alert.
“Got the time?” “Jay” had circled back on them.
The certainty of what would happen next filled Houston. Mentally he picked up the weapons he had thought it was safe to lay down. Without taking his eyes off Jay he noted the sounds around him, the motion. The neighborhood was unusually quiet today, and besides, people here knew how to mind their own business.
Molly was looking up at the thug, smiling, intent on seeing the good in him, just as she was intent on seeing the good in everyone. Even a man who had come into her life to bring changes she hadn’t wanted.
Except falling in love. She’d wanted that. The bridal gown should have warned him. He should have backed away while he still could have. Because Molly was about to see something of him that he had not intended to show her. That he thought he had managed to kill within himself.
She looked at her wrist, gave “Jay” the time. Houston was silent, reading the predatory readiness in that man’s body language, the threat.
Silently he begged for Molly to pay attention to her intuition, to never mind hurting anyone’s feelings if she was wrong. He wanted her to run, to get the hell out of the way. To not see what was going to happen next.
“How bout a cigarette?” the man asked.
The first doubt crossed Molly’s features. Houston could feel her looking at him for direction, but he dared not take his eyes off “Jay,” not for a second.
“I don’t smoke,” she said uneasily.
Adrenaline rushed through Houston. In one smooth move he had taken Molly and shoved her behind his back, inserted himself between her and the threat.
“He doesn’t want a cigarette, Molly,” he said, still not taking his eyes from the man.
“Ain’t no watch worth you dying for,” the man told him, and Houston saw the flash of a silver blade appear in his palm.
“Or you,” Houston said.
Molly gasped. “Just give him the watch.”
But if “Jay” got the watch, then what? Then the purse? Then the wallet? Then Molly?
The watch might not be worth dying for. But other things were.
“Just give it up,” the man was saying in a reasonable tone of voice. “No one has to get hurt.”
Something primal swept Houston. He went to a place without thought, a place of pure instinct. Years on the speed bag had made him lightning fast.
He knew his own speed and he knew his own strength, and there was nothing in him that held back from using them both. He was outgunned, the man both taller and heavier than him. There could be no holding back. None.
He was aware his breath was harsh, but that he felt calm, something at his core beyond calm. Still. It felt strangely as if this was the moment he’d prepared for his entire life, all those hours at the bag, running on cold mornings, practicing the grueling left right combinations and jabs.
All for this. To be ready for this one moment when he had to protect Molly.
“Hey, man,” the guy said, “give it up, I tell you.”
But the phrase was only intended to distract. Peripherally Houston registered the silvery flash in the young thug’s hand, the glitter of malice in his eyes. Houston was, in a split second, a man he had never wanted Molly to see, a man he had never wanted to see himself, even as he’d been aware of the shadowy presence within him.
This was what he had tried to outrun, the violence of his father, the primitive ability to kill thrumming through his veins. He was a man who had never left these streets behind him at all, who was ready now to claim the toughness, the resilience, the resourcefulness that a person never really left behind them.
His fists flashed. Left jab. Straight right. The man slashed at him once, but his heaviness made him less than agile, and Houston’s fury knew no bounds. Jay went down under the hail of fists, crashed to the sidewalk.
Houston was on top of him, some instinct howling within him. Don’t let him get up. Not until you see the knife. Where is it?
Pounding, pounding in the rhythm to the waves of red energy that pulsed through him. The fury drove his fists into the crumpled form of Jay over and over.
Slowly he became aware that Molly was pulling at him, trying to get him off him, screaming.
“Stop, Houston. You’re going to kill him.”
“Where’s the knife?”
And then he saw it, the silver blade under Jay’s leg. The man had probably dropped it the minute he’d been hit.
Still, Houston was aware of his reluctance, as he came back to her, made himself stop, rose to his feet, tried to shake it off.
He was aware he had come here to show Molly where he was from, to see how she reacted to that.
Instead, he had found out who he really was. A thug. Someone who could lose control in the blink of an eye. He’d brought Molly down here to see if she could handle his reality. He was grateful this test that not even he could have predicted or expected had come.
They were not going to move forward. There was no relationship with Molly Michaels in his future.
What if he got this angry at her? The way his father had gotten angry at his mother? And claimed it was love.
And if anybody asked him why he had just pulverized that young man, wouldn’t that be his answer, too?
Because he loved her.
And he would protect her with his very life.
Even if that meant protecting her from himself.
He had come so close to believing he could have it all. Now watching that dream fade, he felt bereft.
The man rolled to his side, scrambled drunkenly to his feet, sent a bewildered look back, blood splashing down a nose that was surely broken onto a shirt. The knife lay abandoned on the sidewalk.
Only when he was sure that Jay was gone did Houston turn to her. She stared at him silently. And then her face crumpled. A sob escaped her and then another. She began to shake like a leaf. She crept into him, laid her head against his chest and cried.
Just the shock of the assault? Or because she had seen something in him that she couldn’t handle and that love could not tame, had no hope of healing?
Houston took off his jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders, pulled her close into him, aware of how fragile she was, how very, very feminine, how his breath stirred her hair.
There was that exquisite moment of heightened awareness where it felt as if he was breathing her essence into his lungs.
To savor. To hold inside him forever. Once he said goodbye.
And then, out of nowhere, heaven sent, a cab pulled up and he shoved her in it.
“B-b-but shouldn’t we wait for the police?”
The police? No, when you grew up in these neighborhoods you never quite got clear of the feeling that the police were not your friends.
<
br /> Besides, what if some nosy reporter was monitoring the scanner? What a great story that would make. CEO of successful company wins fight with street thug. But just a bit of digging could make the story even more interesting. A nineteen-year-old story of a bank robbery.
Loser, his mother had screamed when there was another lost job, another Friday with no paycheck. The look on her face of such disdain.
And the look on his father’s.
I will win her. I will show her. I will show them all.
Except he hadn’t. His father had been his mother’s hero for all of two hours, already drunk, throwing money around carelessly. The police had arrived and taken him. An innocent bystander shot, but not, thank God, killed, during the bank robbery his father had committed. Nineteen years of a life spent for an attempt to win what Houston realized, only just now, could not be won.
“No police,” he said firmly. “Give the driver your address.”
It was a mark of just how shaken she was that she didn’t even argue with him, but gave her address and then collapsed against him, her tears warming his skin right though his shirt. His hand found her hair. Was there a moment in the last few days when he had not thought of how her hair felt?
Touching it now felt like a homecoming he could not hold on to. Because in the end, wasn’t love the most out of control thing of all?
And yet he could not deny, as he held her, that that’s what the fierce protectiveness that thrummed through him felt like. As if he would die protecting her if he had to, without hesitation, without fear.
A feeling was coming over him, a surge of endorphins releasing like a drug into his brain and body.
He would have whatever she gave him tonight. He would savor it, store it in a safe place in his heart that he could return to again and again.
Once it was over. And it would be over soon enough. He did not have to rush that moment.
He helped her up the stairs to her apartment. Her hands were shaking so badly he had to take the keys from her.
“Do you have something to drink?” he asked, looking at her pale face.
“Zinfandel,” she said. “Some kind of chicken zinfandel.”
