Cherish and Protect

by Lori Ryan

  His mom first, although he probably wasn’t old enough to remember much about her when she died. She didn’t know much about his childhood, but from what Laura had told her, she and James had been close, relying on each other when their father’s cruelty got to be too much. Then Laura had married and left him. As happy as he’d probably been for her, it had to hurt to be left behind.

  He’d built a career in the military, then, albeit a short one. And then his whole life had been taken. For years, his freedom, his safety, and likely some of his sanity had been ripped out from under him.

  “Why do you say that?” Presley asked, running her fingers through his hair.

  “I guess you get used to waiting for the bad to come.”

  The statement made her ache for him. “Tell me about some of the bad.”

  She didn’t think he would, but he surprised her.

  “I fell in love over there.”

  Presley stilled for a minute but forced herself to relax.

  “When they took me, I was injured.”

  She knew that. He’d told her he didn’t remember any of the battle where he was captured. It was why he wrote in his journal, trying to piece together flashes and images as they came to him. Presley held still, reminding herself to breathe, forcing herself to be silent. She didn’t want to stop him from talking if this was what he needed.

  “I was taken first by one of the leading drug cartels in the area, Peña.”

  “Not Silva?” She asked.

  He looked surprised she knew the name.

  “You say his name in your sleep sometimes.” She didn’t mention that he called for Catalina more often.

  James shook his head. “Silva didn’t have me for a while. When I was first captured, I was hurt so bad, Peña didn’t have much use for me. Didn’t know if I’d live long enough to be of any use.”

  She thought of the scars on his legs, scarring from burns going up to the thighs. She knew James had no memory of the events, but Hunt had told him he’d been in a building that had blown up. Hunt and Lars didn’t think James could have survived the explosion. The whole building had been destroyed. But when backup arrived and they went in to find the bodies of their squad mates, they’d found everyone but James.

  Presley kept her fingers running through his hair, again and again, the repetition soothing.

  James looked confused for a minute. “Peña was there, but so was Silva.”

  “You remember that?”

  He shook his head, brow furrowed, and she knew it frustrated him to be missing so many details about that day. “I remember Silva’s voice, but Peña had me when I was first taken, so he must have been there.”

  He stared into space for several minutes, and she thought he was finished until he spoke again.

  “The leader of the cartel, a man named Peña, gave me to a woman in the jungle to heal. She was old and people said she was a witch, but I think she was just good with medicine. She knew how to find what she needed in the land she lived off. She and her granddaughter kept me for months in their home, treating my injures and nursing me back to health.”

  So they could torture him, she thought. It was sick to heal someone, only so you could break them again, wasn’t it?

  “Catalina,” he said, almost a whisper.

  “That was the woman?” Presley asked, breaking her silence.

  “Her granddaughter.” He didn’t say anything more and she didn’t ask. He seemed to have taken the story as far as he wanted it to go for the moment, but she wondered if Catalina was the woman he’d loved.

  Where was Catalina now, she wondered? More, though, she wondered if James still loved Catalina, and if he could ever love another. Because heaven help her, she wanted him to whisper her name that way. With reverence and an ache that said he wasn’t quite whole without that person. Heaven help her, she wanted that because it was how she’d started to feel for him. Like, when this was over, she wouldn’t be quite whole.

  25

  A week later, James watched as Presley walked across the field to him. She wasn’t limping any longer and wasn’t wearing her air cast. If she’d seen him, she made no indication of it. He leaned against the door to the barn and watched the sun hit her face. Presley was everything beautiful and light in the world. He wanted to reach out and touch her, let that beauty and light seep into his soul and make him strong again.

  He saw the instant she noticed him. Her eyes flashed brighter and a smile broke onto her features. Something inside of him whispered that he didn’t deserve her. That he should push her far away before he tarnished her with who and what he was, but he wasn’t strong enough to do that. At some point, he’d begun to need Presley Royale.

  When she got to where he stood, he reached out and tugged her to him, wrapping himself around her as he bent his head to rest on hers.

  “You feel good,” she said, tipping her head back and looking up at him. He liked that he didn’t have to bend much to drop a kiss to her lips. She was tall and strong. His match in so many ways.

  He kissed her deeply, then leaned back to catch the dazed moment she probably didn’t know she had whenever he kissed her like that. He liked watching her that way.

  “I have things to show you today,” he said.

  Presley grinned lasciviously at him. “Oh yeah?”

  And then he was laughing and the lightness he’d wanted to harness from her had come, however fleeting, into him. “Not that kind of show and tell, although we can save that for later.”

  He took her hand and pulled her inside, watching as she bent to greet Lulu.

  James led Presley to his work area, where he’d been playing around with ideas for her shop. He lifted a section of log he’d quartered, this time using a saw to make the cut so he ended up with two flat surfaces and a rounded surface that still had the bark on it. He went to the wall and held the log up against it.

  “I was thinking we could mount pieces like this as floating shelves around the space,” he said as she came over to look at it. “I can stain them in whatever color you want or even just oil them and leave them natural.”

  “I love that.” She reached out and ran her fingers over the grain where he’d sanded it down.

  “Good.” It was ridiculous how happy it made him feel to make her happy. He set down the log and pulled her over toward the table he’d been working on for Laura. “I finished this,” he said, hoping she would like the way the table had turned out.

  She ran her hands over the top of it, feeling the smooth surface of the resin.

  “It’s beautiful, James! I can’t believe you made this.”

  He grinned. “I was thinking I can do something similar for your workspace. I can make it larger so it’s big enough for more than one person to work at it when you get to the point where you need that. I have a few ideas for custom elements we can do on it.”

  “Show me,” she said, and he flashed again to the idea of show and tell with Presley. Damn, she was going to be the death of him.

  He put his hand on the wide bands of metal he’d used to frame out the table top. “If I frame the table with this, then we can also make some small rectangle shapes with the metal and set it into the top before I pour the resin. It will give you cups to store things like scissors and whatever else you need when you’re working.”

  “Oh, I like that idea.”

  He went on, pointing to the outer edges of the table. “I was also thinking, I can add a strip around the edges of the table, maybe three inches wide.” He held his hand out at the edge to show her. “I’d make them slanted runners, open at the top and then with an opening at the bottom of each corner of the table. You would be able to push any scraps from your work down into the runner around the edge and the slant would make it easy to push all the scraps down to the opening at the corner and right into a trash can.”

  She didn’t answer this time with words. She came and wrapped her arms around him and crushed him in a hug.

  James laughed. “You
like that idea?”

  “I love it!”

  She’d been ordering supplies for the shop the other day and had told him that the workspace in the back would be filled with wet and slippery stems from the cuttings. She’d need nonslip mats under her feet and would have to sweep up the cuttings regularly. She’d still need the mats, but this would make it a lot easier for her to keep the space clean.

  Now for the really scary part. “I was thinking, I want to go see the building with you.”

  “You do?” She couldn’t hide the surprise in her voice.

  He nodded. “I can’t promise I’ll make it. We might get out on the road and I’ll need to come running back, but I want to try.” He didn’t add the running back like a baby part of his thoughts.

  “That’s okay. You do what you can.” She didn’t say it like she thought there was anything wrong with a grown man who couldn’t leave his home. Not even his home, a home he was living in for free because there wasn’t any way he could hold down a job.

  “Can we try to go today?”

  She nodded. “And you need to tell me what I need to budget for the table and shelves and things.”

  “Nothing. You don’t need to pay me for them. It gives me something to do.”

  “Nonsense.” Her hands went to her hips as she schooled him. “Of course, I’m paying you for your work. It’s incredible. You could make pieces like this for a living, especially if you custom design them for people like you’re doing for me.”

  James took a step backward and scowled. “Yeah, sure, I could charge people and then have a breakdown in the middle of their project and not be able to deliver in time. That’ll go over well.”

  She was forgetting the fact he sometimes stopped working for days, hiding upstairs in the loft. Either that, or she was choosing to ignore that little reality.

  “You’re an artist. People can put up with whatever they need to from an artist if the work is good enough. And this is.”

  She came forward, hands going to his shoulders. He felt the anger that seemed to rip through him at times with no warning and no reasonable connection to anything that was happening. It was an overreaction, pure and simple.

  “Stop it, Presley. Don’t baby me. I am what I am and there isn’t anything that’s going to change that, so you need to stop thinking you can.”

  She kept her face calm and waited while he yelled. He didn’t want to see the patience she was giving him. It wasn’t something he deserved. Why didn’t she yell and tell him what an ass he was?

  Lulu came and stood next to him, pressing into his leg. The dog didn’t deserve this either, he knew. He suspected Cade had taught the dog to handle sudden yelling and screaming, but still, she didn’t deserve what he put her through.

  He couldn’t stop it, though. Whenever the anger hit like this, it hit hot and hard, running through his blood like lava.

  He picked up the floating shelf he’d made her only minutes before and threw it against the wall, the sound satisfying in the dim light.

  Darkness. He was better in the dark. He should live there and never try to come out of it.

  “Go away, Pres.” He didn’t yell the words, but they were hard and angry, and they should have frightened her into retreat.

  He heard her footsteps as she turned to walk away, but she didn’t go far enough. When he turned, it was to see her sitting on one of the chairs, ignoring him and looking at one wall of the barn. She was staying close, but letting him have his rage.

  James fell to his haunches, kneeling and letting his head fall to his hands. What the hell was wrong with him?

  He tipped his head back and roared his anger for long minutes, before letting his head fall back to his hands. Sometimes, the anger that overtook him scared him. He didn’t know how to handle it. The lessons Sarah had taught him weren’t automatic enough to come to him at times like this.

  He didn’t know how long they stayed like that. It might have been twenty minutes, or two hours. At some point, Lulu came to him, pressing her head to his hand. He sat back, landing on the wood floor, and let her crawl into his lap. He held the dog and waited for the emotions to ebb.

  In time, Presley stood and came to him, holding out her hand and walking with him to the loft when he took it.

  Going to the flower shop would have to wait for another day. He wasn’t ready for that yet.

  26

  James waited a few days before bringing up the trip to her flower shop again.

  “Maybe we can go to the building today? I want you to show me where you want things and I need to take some measurements.” He said this as casually as he could. He didn’t know if she’d still be willing to try it with him. Hell, he’d been surprised she stayed with him.

  The last thing he wanted to do was be abusive to Presley or take advantage of what she offered him. She was there whenever he needed her and she’d stayed there throughout the whole episode. It was more than he deserved.

  His father had been an abusive ass when he was growing up. He rarely hit James and Laura, but his mood swings and drinking had been abusive, all the same. He’d cut into them with words that hurt in ways punches couldn’t. If they hadn’t had each other growing up, things would have been ugly.

  James didn’t want that for Presley. She deserved better than him. One of these days, he was going to need to send her away. To tell her she needed to find a man worthy of her. He was a selfish asshole for not doing that now. But he swore to himself, if he saw he was acting like his dad, he’d cut her out of his life rather than hurt her the way his dad had hurt him and Laura.

  “We can do that,” she said, with a smile, taking his hand in hers. He loved it when she did that. Her hand was strong, but smaller than his. He liked the way the brush of her skin against his felt as he wrapped his fingers around hers. “When do you want to go?”

  The conversation was feeling all too reminiscent of the one that had taken place right before his rage the other day. It made his skin itch like it was too tight. “Now?” He wanted to do this before he chickened out.

  She just smiled, eyes dancing with excitement as she grabbed her purse. “Let’s go.”

  When they got to the car, James realized he needed to drive. He had thought he’d sit in the passenger seat and work on keeping his breathing steady but that hadn’t worked all that well with Laura when she took him to the therapist. By the time he’d gotten to his appointment, he’d been in physical pain from the tension in his body.

  It hit him suddenly that he needed the control of being behind the wheel. He hadn’t had that when Laura drove, but he had a feeling if he could get behind the wheel, it would make a difference.

  “Can I drive?”

  If she thought anything of the request, she didn’t say so. “Sure.” She pointed to the driver’s side as she moved to the passenger’s side. “Just push the button to start the car.”

  It occurred to him then that she was turning over a Jaguar to him. This wasn’t an old clunker.

  Then he remembered he had Lulu by his side. The thought of leaving the ranch without her made him sick to his stomach. He looked around. Cade had an old Jeep by the other barn. Maybe they could find him and ask to borrow that.

  Presley apparently wasn’t concerned. She opened the back door and called to Lulu who hopped in and circled twice before settling.

  He slid into the leather seats and took a deep breath.

  “You good?”

  He nodded and looked at the dash. He’d been surprised to see the push button start in his sister’s car, but she’d told him most cars had it now. The things a guy could miss when he was trapped in a hole wondering if you’d be fed in time to keep you alive another day, he thought.

  He put his foot on the brake, pushing the button to start the car.

  He half expected Presley to take an oh-shit grip on the car as he drove, but she leaned back in her seat, looking nothing more than excited to have him with her.

  James braked at the end of the ra
nch’s drive and laughed, drawing a look from Presley.

  “I have no idea where I’m going,” he said looking to the left, then the right.

  She shook her head and laughed with him, pointing to the left. “Follow this road for twenty minutes. Takes you right into town.”

  James breathed deeply as they drove, feeling antsy as he watched the ranch recede in his rear-view mirror. He could do this. And then Presley was talking to him, telling him about the progress at the store, how the workers had cut through the brick and were framing out the windows. She talked about what flowers would be available at good prices during her grand opening based on the season and which suppliers were close by.

  She told him about the paint colors she’d chosen for the walls—which to him sounded like variations of off-white but to her seemed to mean something else—and she talked about her logo which was almost ready.

  Then, they were approaching the town and he was okay. Not fantastic, but okay. There hadn’t been any flashbacks, He didn’t spiral off into blackness.

  She pointed to a side street coming up. “Turn off here and then head south for a few blocks.”

  He did what she said and realized she was taking him around into the residential streets that surrounded the town. She gave him a few more directions, and they were pulling up to a brick building through a small alley at the back entrance.

  She’d taken him around so he didn’t need to drive through the town, he realized.

  Someday, he wanted to stand on the front sidewalk and look up at her building and see her logo there and the flower boxes he planned to build to go outside her windows. He would do it, but today, he was grateful she’d realized he needed to come in the back.

  The back door was open and a large stack of lumber was piled off to one side. A man in a tool belt ducked out, grabbed some of the wood, then walked back through the opening. There were the sounds of men talking and a saw buzzing and the smell that fills the air when wood is cut. It was soothing to him.