by Amy Gregory
“Here.” He said, holding the notebook out to Dallas. “Take this to her before you leave. It’ll help her.”
“Help her?”
Levi paused, shaking his head. Shock and regret filled his expression. “You don’t know anything about it, do you?”
Dallas already had the leather notebook in hand, but Levi suddenly looked ashamed. Clasping his fingers behind his head, he looked at the floor. “I shouldn’t have said anything, damn it.” He pulled in a long breath and dropped his arms as he rolled his eyes. “I just assumed she’d shared that with you.”
Dallas glanced at what he was holding, almost afraid to open it. “Is it…a diary?”
“No.” Levi answered quickly. “She”—he pulled in a deep breath—“she writes songs. Well, she didn’t realize they were songs at first, until I caught her in here late one night after she’d had a bad day. I talked her into showing me what she was doing and as soon as I saw the words—I had to tell her. She wasn’t even aware of it, and even then I had to prove it to her. She is an amazing, gifted song writer. I’ve taken two of them and written music to go with the lyrics. Th-that’s what I was coming back to do that night. I’d forgotten my guitar at home, and I…God, I’m sorry. I must sound like an emotional basket-case. I just can’t get that night out of my head—”
“So, you were coming back to work on a song and…and that fucker was on her?”
“Yeah.”
The one word left Levi on a forced breath, as if it hurt him to say it.
Dallas gripped the leather notebook to his chest, the smell of it reminding him of the black leather jacket he’d helped her put on more times than he could count over the years. Her smell, her perfume touched it lightly, probably as she’d held it tight to her own chest on more than one occasion.
The remnants of his anger and jealousy toward Levi fell away instantly, the man was a wreck. Devastated by what he’d walked in on, haunted by what he’d seen, and just as powerless as the rest of them. He’d stopped a monster with his bare fists. If it had been him who walked through her office door, Dallas knew without a doubt he would have beat the guy to a bloody pulp, just as Levi had. The guy was lucky, because he wouldn’t have stopped until he bastard wasn’t breathing any longer. Dallas understood how his grandfather worked. Levi christened himself as one of the family the night he’d saved Alex.
There was a clear picture in his mind of a little girl in white bows, whisking him up the stone staircase of her grandparent‘s front porch. As tight as her little hand held him that day, she held tighter to his heart, and without a word ever spoken Dallas had appointed himself her protector. Sure she had a large, tight-knit family, but for some reason Alex had always belonged to him. For the first time, he was truly taken-aback, because he knew their world that had always seemed so small and safe—wasn’t. Not anymore. Added to that, he knew for a fact he wasn’t as invincible as he once thought he was.
The phone in his pocket vibrated, and without looking he knew who it was.
Heat gripped at his stomach, the acid making its way up his throat. There wasn’t any thought to it, three chewables were in his mouth before he even realized it.
“God, Dallas. You just took some of those…in the car on the way over. You okay, man?” The room in which they were still standing felt like it was starting to close in around him. “Dallas?”
His breathing was quick and shallow, not uncommon for some people, but not him. He trained rigorously, his body was in top shape, but that wasn’t stopping the weight on his chest from bearing down heavily. Levi’s face lined with questions, then those lines deepened with what appeared to be concern the longer he held out on answering. Swallowing a gulp of air, he rushed out. “Can you run me by my house—I need to talk to my Dad.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Are you sure you don’t need to just go to the emergency room?”
Dallas shook his head, not trusting all the crap bouncing around in it. Though his knuckles were turning white from gripping the notebook in one hand, he ran his other palm over his thigh several times, but the clamminess remained. It was a short drive from the school down the road to the last driveway on the dead-end street, but his anxiety was ramping up as the large Mediterranean home came into view through the trees.
He had to do this, it was the only answer. His heart pounded faster as Levi put the brake on. “Come on in.” Without waiting to hear the other man’s answer, he was halfway up the walk to the back door before Levi had the car turned off. Knowing the door wouldn’t be locked he rushed into the massive kitchen.
“Dad!” He hollered, scanning the room.
“What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be headed to the airport?” Tasia asked as she came out of the laundry room, a pair of her jeans in one hand, a hanger in the other, and her face scrunched in question.
“Where’s, Dad?”
“I don’t know, I think he’s in his office. Mom ran Marc to Uncle Jesse and Aunt Emery’s, but she’ll be right back. Is everything okay?”
Levi came through the open door, shutting it quietly behind him. Glancing between him and his sister, he blinked repeatedly before the light bulb went off. “Tay, this is Levi. Levi, this is my sister Tasia. Maybe you all have met before, I don’t know. Um…Tay, can you do me a favor and offer him something to drink or something. Thanks.” he said briskly as he walked passed her to the entryway.
Just as she said, there was his dad, sitting behind the dark cherry desk that gleamed in the sunlight coming through the office window. “Dad?”
“Hey son. I was just getting ready to call you. We’re running late. Are you ready to head to the airport?”
“Dad,”—he gulped for air once again—“I’m…done.”
Searching the man’s face for clues, Dallas waited for what seemed like hours before Eli spoke. He caught himself with the roll of antacids in his hand, unaware he’d even pulled it out of his pocket for the umpteenth time.
“Done? With what? Have a seat, what’s going on?”
Shoving the medicine back in his jeans, he scrubbed his hands over his face and paced back-and-forth twice before answering. “I can’t leave her. I quit, I’m done racing. I can’t leave Alex…not again.”
Understanding melted the lines across his father’s face, and the weight that had been crushing Dallas, the one that had been multiplying in size daily over the last couple of weeks suddenly vanished into thin air. Taking the first deep breath he’d been able to grasp in what felt like ages, he sank into one of the cold leather chairs opposite his father.
From the time they’d met when he was a boy, Eli had always just gotten it. Whatever “it” was, whether it was racing, homework, dealing with his career—all of it. Every problem in his life, Eli understood. The two happiest days of his life were when Eli married his mom, only to be equaled by the day Eli officially adopted him. And the man had never let him down, not once. There wasn’t going to be a fight to prove the need to retire, or questioning his loyalty to a woman over his career.
Dallas hadn’t actually gotten that far in the thought process yet. He knew he was miserable, and had been since he’d left her, and it was all compounded by the attack. But it was the look on her face this morning that changed the level of hell he was going through. It took standing in her office staring at the man who saved her for it to hit him. Suddenly it was as if the answer had been there the whole time. Alex was his home. He was home, and he needed to stay here—with her, permanently.
“It’s the right thing to do. She needs you, Dallas. But let me ask you a question, and think about it, because you need to be honest—with yourself. Do you love her?”
He never missed a beat. “Yes. Yes, I do. I always have.”
“You’re not feeling this way because you think it’s what we expect, or you think you’re doing her a favor?”
Looking past his father to the wall behind him was like a step back in time. The built-in cabinets matched his desk and were filled with
so many picture frames it took an hour just to dust that room alone. It was one frame, in particular, that grabbed his attention. The frame held different pictures of different sizes, but all of them were of him and Alex together. He remembered each time and place as if it were only yesterday. There was one of his very first family dinners when he was eleven with three-year-old Alex on his lap, her sixth birthday when she made him help her blow the candles out. Them on her front porch swing with her long blonde curls spread out over his legs as she lay with her head in his lap as a teen, and both of them with gigantic smiles the day she got her Jeep she loves so dearly. Dallas saw himself with his legs stretched out, both asleep on her couch, her head on his shoulder, and her eyes also closed. He heard her laughter as he looked at the photo where he caught her mid-jump as he was stepping down from the podium after his first career win as a professional.
It was always her…by his side, even distance and time hadn’t separated them.
“No, Dad. I’ve always loved her.”
His father followed his line of sight to the frame. The largest picture of the two them together said it all, even without seeing their eyes. In full gear, both with reflective goggles covering their faces, but mid-jump they were side-by-side, sailing through the air and looking right at each other. They were bonded by so many things. Their complete love and loyalty to their large, eclectic family was only half of it. The other half was their joint love of a sport neither could live without.
Their whole family, in their own way, lived to hear the rev of an engine. Even his sister Tasia, who could never be convinced to do more than sit on a bike with him for a picture, appreciated the sport, because it was their livelihood, their dreams. But it was Alex who would put in eighteen and twenty hour work days, giving blood, sweat and tears to the sport’s future racers. It was Alex who would stand by his side, always wanting to spend just a few more minutes with a student. It was Alex who was his future.
“Well, I’ll pull your contract out and look over it with Grandpa, see what we can do to get you out of it. It’s on the tail-end, so I can only pray if we explain the circumstances, in as little detail as possible, they’ll understand. Riders retire mid-season all the time for various reasons. Please tell me you haven’t signed anything committing you for next season yet, right?”
“Hell no…I’m so sick of Steve and Carl. I’d had other people calling me, so I wasn’t worried about being desperate enough to be stuck with them again.”
“I know you, and you’ve always been one who ponders, does things rationally and quietly. I’m guessing though, this time you haven’t taken more than thirty seconds to come to this decision, not with the way you came flying into the house like your ass was on fire. Are you going to be happy? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to talk you out of it. I’m thrilled with the thought of having you back home, but I don’t want you to second-guess yourself down the line. You know, once everything is back to normal around here, I don’t want you to resent Alex because you feel like you walked away from your career in the height of your glory.”
“Dad…winning means nothing anymore. Not if I don’t have her by my side, and right now—I don’t. I need to do this. I need to come home and take care of her, and I’ll be happy—if she forgives me for leaving in the first place. I should have been here then none of this would have happened. It’s all my fault—”
“No son! Nothing about that night is your fault. I won’t let you off the hook about how you left, but you’re a Hunter, and well, we do stupid shit sometimes when it comes to women. The important thing is—you’re a Hunter, and you know deep down in your heart exactly what she needs, and you’re willing to do whatever it takes to make sure she gets it. Alex is a lot like your mother. Material things don’t mean anything to her. She just needs you and your love to be happy. You’re a good man, Dallas. Your mom and I couldn’t be prouder of the man you’ve grown to be.”
His dad had never yelled at him, even when he occasionally did something to disappoint the man. Knowing his father was disappointed in him was enough to crush him, and Eli somehow understood and never rubbed it in. Several times a day, Dallas replayed the last conversation they had at home before he left the last time. It sickened him to know his father’s words were point on, but Eli was right, he was a Hunter, and he would fix all this. He’d fix Alex and vowed silently never to let her be hurt again.
Levi’s mind was racing as he sat listening to Tasia bounce around the kitchen, happily chattering to entertain him while her brother spoke with their father in the front office. Two ends of the spectrum fought for dominance, on one end, she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever laid eyes on, but on the other she was only eighteen.
How could he have worked at the academy for over four years and never met her. He’d seen pictures of her in Alex’s office, and knew her name, but they’d always managed to miss each other. Levi knew she was a dancer, and Alex had mentioned she was trying to make a career of it when he’d been caught gazing at a photo. He would never have recognized her, not with the way her hair had been tightly pinned up in a perfect bun, with stage makeup and a costume turning her into perfection, the pose caught mid-flight across the stage.
As she reached for a glass from the cabinet, the long lines of her body were accented by the muscles she’d developed through all her hours spent in the studio. He swallowed hard and tried to remind himself again this was Dallas’s younger sister—much younger sister. And then it hit him, like a brick to the head.
He’d spoken the words aloud, told Dallas he understood. But as he watched Tasia floating across the kitchen toward him, her smile bright and carefree—he got it. Tasia knocked him flat on his ass with just one killer smile. She had such a unique look to her, unlike Alex who was the ultimate blonde bombshell, Tasia struck him so violently he couldn’t help but stare.
She’d gotten her coloring from her father, and her eyes were almost as pale as ice-green sea glass. Her hair, although it was pinned up tight, was a contradiction if he’d ever seen one. In the muted light of the kitchen, it was more brown, but sitting across from him now, the sunlight of the large windows streaming in, there was the glint of red that was all her mother’s. With dark eyelashes and pink lips, she needed no makeup, and her lithe figure was highlighted by the jeans she had on. He’d heard somewhere once, something about a girl having a dancer’s body. Now he knew exactly what that expression meant, especially the part about the legs that went on forever.
Pulling in long drinks of the iced tea she’d made for him, he smiled. She was comfortable in her own skin. No girly flirtations or game playing. She was out-going enough to talk and keep up the conversation, with little help from him since his brain had gone on auto-pilot. He shifted, stretching his own legs out in front of him to try and relieve the tightness in his crotch from the zipper constricting him.
“Are you sure I can’t make you a sandwich or something? Really, it’s no bother.”
Her voice was so sweet, he melted. “No,”—he grinned seeing her manners demand she take care of him—“I’m good, but thank you for the offer.”
Sitting at the end of the table, she was in the spot catty-corner to him. Levi reached out to pat her hands that rested on the table. The bite from the contact had him gripping her hands tighter into his palm. The smile faded from his face, replaced with astonishment and hunger.
He was in no way a good-timing party animal looking for an easy lay, but he knew his way around the bedroom. Levi also knew the doe-eyed stare and nervous blink were various layers of innocence. Rubbing his thumb over the silky soft skin of her hand, he watched her eyes, saw her swallow hard. With only the soft hum of the refrigerator in the background, her rapid breathing was unmistakable. Yet, she didn’t pull away from him.
He tried to do the math in his head. Each answer was the same. She was young—he was not. However, it was the same equation Dallas had struggled with, the same number of years between them. Seven.
Dating over the ye
ars led him to the same conclusion time and again. He wasn’t going to settle. He wanted to find “the one”, not just anyone. If that meant he spent more nights with his guitar than he did with a warm soft body lying next to his, then so be it. It also meant Levi was absolutely positive that reaction he was still feeling coursing through his veins, making his pulse pound in his ears, was real.
The voices that hadn’t been distinguishable before were suddenly coming closer, the footsteps on the tiles echoing. Dallas and his father were both about to turn the corner. In an unpracticed move he gently pulled Tasia’s knuckles to his lips, leaning in to place a feather soft kiss against her skin. As he let go, he winked. Even her darker skin didn’t completely hide the tint that stained her cheeks.
“What’s that smile for?” Dallas asked.
Levi realized that Dallas, although teasing her, had clued in to his sister’s shy grin. Instead of being cocky that he’d been able to make her heart beat faster, it was his own heart pounding again—for a different reason. Levi only had one brother, and he was older by a couple of years. He had a feeling though, given what he’d grown to love about everyone involved with this family, Dallas was probably prone to being over-protective, not to mention her father who was standing right by his side.
“Looks like your brother is here to stay, you finally broke him Tay—after all those years of begging.”
Her jaw dropped, silent for only a split-second before she was up and had her arms wrapped tightly around his neck. “Oh, Dallas. I’m so glad. Now Alex will be okay. She won’t be so sad. I’ve been so worried about her.”
Tasia’s last few words were whispered and heartfelt. Dallas patted her back, but glanced over her shoulder to him. Levi felt like an ass. For a small moment in time, he’d forgotten all about the pain surrounding his friend Alex.
