by Abby Brooks
Mom leaned back in her chair, gazing at her lap. “I’ll contact the lawyers and see what it takes to hit Madeline with a slander or libel case. We can’t do anything about the affair, because the story is true. But the girl?” Questions swam in my mother’s eyes and I was afraid she would drown in them.
“None of what Madeline said about us is true. Kara and I…we’re complicated. But nothing inappropriate happened between us while she was underage. I swear.”
“And she would attest to that?”
“Of course she would,” I replied with more certainty than I was feeling. Most of me believed what I said, but a small part, a terrible part trained by Burke Hutton kept whispering that Kara was as false as Madeline.
“Unless she’s in league with her mother,” Mom said, echoing my worst fears.
“Which she isn’t.”
“Again, I would have said the same thing about you until today.”
The look in her eyes said she knew her words would hit a weak spot, so I lashed out for one of her own. “If you didn’t want me to end up like him, why did you stay with him after things got bad?”
Mom stared at me as I waited for the answer I knew I would never get. “Go,” she said. “Talk to the girl. See if you still believe her. I’ll get the lawyers on the phone and see what I can do from here.”
I stood and stormed out of the room, pushing past a devastated Harlow on my way to the door. She called my name, but I ignored her, my focus locked on one single person.
The girl who had spent years wrapping me around her little finger.
The woman who owned my heart.
The child of the bitch who threatened to ruin me.
Kara Lockhart.
Chapter Twenty-One
Kara
I stepped out of my apartment and froze on the small slab of concrete the complex called a patio as my gaze fell on Wyatt, sitting in his parked car, staring directly at me. I smiled and lifted a hand, even as dread settled in my gut.
Something was wrong.
Something was terribly, horribly, awfully wrong.
He pushed open his car door and stood, closing it behind him without so much as a smile.
“I have the worst case of déjà vu right now,” I said, testing the waters with a joke. “I mean, how many times have I come outside to find you stalking me from your car?”
Wyatt strode toward me and something in his posture had me backing up before I got control of myself. This was Wyatt, after all. I had nothing to be afraid of. Especially after last night…
He stopped directly in front of me, his jaw and fists clenched, his nostrils flaring, his shoulders tensed. I reached out to him and he stepped away.
“Did you know?” He spoke with force and shook with restraint.
“Did I know what? What’s wrong, big guy?” From the looks of him? Everything.
Wyatt started pacing in front of me, a tight path of angry steps. “About your mother,” he said, stopping long enough to shove his hands into his back pockets and stare up at the sky. “Please tell me you had nothing to do with what happened this morning.”
I stepped back from the hurt in his voice. I knew he was going to talk to his mom, and I expected him to be upset, but this…this…it was too much. Something else had happened. “Hey. You’re scaring me.”
He resumed pacing. “I’m trying to stay calm right now because you deserve the benefit of the doubt, but damn it, Kara! This is one hell of a coincidence!” His voice echoed off the walls of the apartment complex and out of the corner of my eyes, I saw my neighbor peeking through her window to get a glimpse of the drama unfolding on the sidewalk.
“Come inside, Wy. Come inside and tell me what happened.”
From the way he glared at me, he must have considered telling me to fuck off, but thankfully, reason prevailed and Wyatt followed me into my apartment. He wouldn’t sit. He wouldn’t look at me. For a few terrible seconds, he wouldn’t speak. When he finally did, I wished he hadn’t.
He told me about getting to The Hut, intent on explaining to his mom everything that happened between our families, only to find my mother already sitting in the office. He told me how she twisted our interactions into something awful. How she demanded that he marry me. As he spoke, his anger grew, my mother’s story doing exactly what she had crafted it to do, spinning his emotions out of control until he didn’t know who or what to trust.
“My God…” I murmured. “I thought you knew me better than that.”
He stopped pacing and looked at me with such disdain, I flinched.
“I thought I did, too.”
“You do!” I let him see my exasperation. “Are you really telling me you believe my mother over me? Let me tell you something, big guy. That’s not going to fly.”
Wyatt crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re telling me you showed up at my house last night, out of the blue, tricking me into sleeping with you the day before your mom drops this bomb, and I’m supposed to believe it’s coincidence?”
Tricking him? Tricking him? The fact that he thought anything about last night had been contrived had me questioning whether or not he deserved the piece of me he now permanently carried.
“It is coincidence.”
Wyatt raked trembling hands into his hair. “I want to believe you. I’m trying to believe you. But why, why, did you keep coming back? We’d go years without seeing each other, but you just kept showing back up in my life.”
“Because you were my rock.”
He whirled. “Or was I your mark.”
“Damnit Wyatt! You were my everything. You are my everything. I swear, I had no idea Mom was planning something so…” Hideous. Terrible. Diabolical. Hateful. So many words offered to fill that space, and I finally settled on, “…wrong.”
Wyatt was too angry to hear me. He paced and raged, hurt by the accusations, panicked by his mother’s response. Just as he had allowed himself to feel vulnerable toward me, his whole world had turned upside down and I was at the center of the devastation. I understood his anger, but my own emotions were spinning out of control as he flung his words with such abandon.
No.
Not abandon.
He intended to hurt me and he did. My God, he did.
I dropped to my knees in front of him, a last-ditch effort to catch his attention. It worked, though the look on his face broke my heart.
“You’ve used my pity against me enough, don’t you think?” he asked, his lips curling in disgust.
It was the disgust that did me in. Of all the people in my life, only two knew what it was like for me to be Madeline Lockhart’s daughter. Brooke, who had been my best friend since high school and Wyatt. The fact that her lies had any power over him at all was a punch to the gut I might never recover from.
“Fuck you, Wyatt,” I said glaring up at him. “Just…fuck you.” Those were the only words I could find to encapsulate the sheer, sickening disappointment of the moment.
His eyes narrowed. “Seems to me, you already did that.” He started to say something else, but bit back the words. Eyes closed, he let out a long sigh, then turned on his heel and stormed toward the door.
If I let him leave, I would lose him forever. I knew that because I knew him. And for as angry as he was at me, as angry as I was at him for believing anything my mother had to say, I couldn’t lose him. Not now. He carried so many pieces of me, I would never be whole again.
I lurched to my feet and caught his wrist. Wyatt whirled and for one terrible moment, I was afraid he would hit me, but no.
No.
He wasn’t that kind of man.
We glared at each other, emotions sizzling the air between us, and then he crushed his lips to mine, his hand gripping the back of my head, holding me hostage even as he gave me what I wanted. I gripped his back, my fingernails digging into his shoulder as his cock dug into my belly.
The kiss turned savage. A war of lips and teeth. Of frustration and confusion. We had found something in e
ach other only to lose it the very next day, and our hearts demanded we find it again. His trust in me was tainted. As was mine in him.
Our bodies became a battlefield, two sides fighting to reclaim something they weren’t sure they could live without. Clothing dropped to the floor and Wyatt pressed me against the wall, capturing my wrists in his hand and pinning them above my head. He penetrated me without caution, without care, his thrusts needy and harsh, and I lifted my hips to his, just as needy. Just as harsh. The wall dug into my spine and I caught his bottom lip between my teeth as he beat a punishing rhythm.
And then, something softened in his eyes. The heat of anger faded from his gaze and he released my hands. His pace sped, though somehow that, too was changed. My body clenched around his, the frustration seeping out of me as Wyatt finished. He pressed his forehead to mine, his gaze intent. Concerned. Confused.
Neither of us spoke, though there was so much that needed said. “Don’t leave like this,” I pleaded through a thickening throat. We were better than this. We had to be.
Wyatt’s eyes softened and he cupped my cheek. “I’m not going anywhere. I couldn’t survive without you.” He pressed a hand to his heart. “You’ve always been here. Always.”
I covered his hand with mine, as if I could reconnect with the piece of me he carried. “Tell me you believe me. That you know I wasn’t manipulating you.”
He thinks you’re just like your mom, whispered the voice I thought I had banished so many years ago.
Wyatt pulled his shirt on, his hair standing out from his head, looking as wild and untamed as I felt. “I believe you,” he said. “I know who you are. You’re nothing like your mother and I know you wouldn’t do this to me.”
I blinked back my surprise as Wyatt leaned in for a kiss so tender my heart broke. He ran a hand through my hair, gentle and delicate now that the storm of his fury had passed. On one level, it felt like I was getting everything I had ever wanted. That I had been obsessed with Wyatt since before we first met and now, despite my mother’s best efforts, we could finally be together.
But that’s where things got messed up.
Despite my mother’s best efforts…
My mom had been pushing me toward Wyatt from day one. And when she couldn’t succeed in pushing me to him, she had resorted in pushing him toward me.
That was, after all, the only reason he came to my apartment today. One giant, calculated shove from my mom had set this whole encounter in motion. As Wyatt and I stood there, sizing each other up, I had to wonder what happened in his head as he fucked me against the wall. What had caused the change in his eyes?
Had he forgiven me?
Or had my mother finally won?
Chapter Twenty-Two
Wyatt
I wanted every minute Kara and I ever spent together to be real, a slow-motion dance of trust and vulnerability. I wanted to know that Madeline was crazy, using her daughter in one more terrible plan to leech money and comfort out of people who had rightfully earned it. I wanted to believe Kara.
I just…
…couldn’t.
Not quite. Doubt had snuck in and made itself comfortable in my heart, a heart that didn’t trust easily in the first place. I found myself weighing each of her words, searching for a chink in her armor that might tell me once and for all if she was lying.
“So now what?” Kara asked as she ran her hands through her hair.
“That’s a good question.”
She stared at me, her eyes bouncing across my face, thoughts ticking away behind them. I watched her defensive walls come up around her. The hardening of her gaze. The lift of her chin. I had to wonder if I looked the same to her. If she could see me analyzing every move she made, every word she said. In that moment, I hated Madeline for all the damage she had ever done to Kara, as well as for the damage she had done to my family, and now, the damage she had done to us.
“Relationships were never really my thing.” Kara painted a blasé expression across her face. “So yeah, this is all getting a little messy for me.” Except I knew her well enough to see how much she regretted those words.
Confronting her would only make her dig her heels in, so I called her bluff. “Yeah. The two of us together seems out of the question now, given that neither of us can trust the other.”
“I trust you.” Judging by the defiance in her glare, Kara intended her statement to come across as a slap to my face. After all, I was the one who had come barging into her apartment, armed with accusations of treachery. But I caught the glimmer of doubt in her eyes.
“But do you really?” I asked. “You really trust me after all this?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Chin lifted. Fire in her eyes. God, she was beautiful.
“Because Madeline told me she wouldn’t go to the press if I married you, and you know I would do anything to protect my family. So, I assume, there has to be part of you that wonders if I’m still standing here because I want to, or because I feel like I have to.”
Kara dropped her gaze, her eyes flickering shut. “Why does it have to be so complicated?”
It was a great question. One I didn’t have an answer to. “Would she do it? Would your mom go to the press? Make those accusations about me?” I choked on the word. It would be so easy to twist my relationship with Kara into something ugly.
“I don’t know. I’ll talk to her, Wy. I’ll talk to her and beg her not to do it.” The look in her eyes was so worried, so innocent, that I truly believed she had nothing to do with her mother’s plan.
And that was a problem. If she was playing me, anything she said and everything she did could be part of the game.
“Would she listen?”
Kara’s face fell. “Probably not. But if she does go to the press, I’ll stand by your side and tell everyone the truth. I’ll even talk to your family, if you think that would help.”
It would take a leap of faith for us to trust each other. A lifetime of manipulation had our instincts screaming to cut our losses and run. I said as much, cupping her cheek. “But I’m not going to run away from you. I couldn’t if I wanted to. Wherever I go, you’re with me.”
She leaned into my hand and closed her eyes. “I am so tired of being used by her.”
“I know, sweet girl.”
I wanted to tell her that this time would be different. That I would do everything I could to keep her safe. While the last part was true, I would fight for her just as fiercely as I would fight for my own family, I couldn’t promise that she would come out of this unscathed. If her mother was willing to drag her daughter’s name through the mud, then there was no telling how far she would go to get what she wanted.
And…if by some chance I discovered that Kara had been in on the plan after all, there would be no end to my wrath.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Wyatt
I made an appointment to see my mom. I did it as a show of respect, calling to let her know I wanted to talk instead of showing up out of the blue. She sounded both relieved to hear from me and hesitant to see me and we ended the call without having much to say to each other. Kara and I drove to The Hut together and I groaned when I saw the parking lot. We wouldn’t just be speaking to my mother that day. She had called in the cavalry and the entire family waited for me inside. That was what Huttons did, after all. When one of us needed help, we flocked together to provide support.
Regardless of what lay ahead, we would get through this. Of that, I had no doubt, because that was also what Huttons did. We stuck together. We moved forward. We overcame.
Kara gave me an encouraging smile as we took the steps to the front porch. “I’ve never been here,” she said. “I used to stalk the pictures online, wondering what it would be like to truly be part of your family. I was so jealous of you all. Burke was the closest thing I ever had to a dad, as creepy as that sounds now that you and I are, you know, together.” She trailed off as I pulled open the front door and ushered her back to the kitchen where I was
certain my family would be waiting for me around the large oak dinner table.
My brothers glared as I stepped over the threshold, Caleb bolting out of his chair and cursing my name. “How could you?” he shouted as he lurched around the table. “How could you do this to us?”
Lucas caught his arm before Caleb could get to me. “Sit down.” He used his Marine voice, barking the order with little room for disobedience. “Let Wyatt talk before you lose your shit.”
Caleb did not sit down. He stood behind his childhood seat at our table, his knuckles white as he gripped the back of his chair. “I used to respect you so much. Lucas left. Dad was useless. But you stuck around and made sure the rest of us were okay. I looked up to you. And now I find you’re no better than him… What the hell am I supposed to do with that?” He looked away, letting out a long breath as a vein in his temple pulsed.
My sister looked at me with sad eyes and my mother wouldn’t look at me at all. All of them ignored Kara, as if refusing to acknowledge her presence would erase her from the family’s history.
“You know,” Lucas said as I sat. “I always wondered why you stayed. It never made sense to me. Never. I thought it was to protect them.” He made a gesture, encompassing our brothers, sister, and mom. “You knew what Dad was capable of, just as much as I did. I thought you stayed to make sure they were all safe.”
“That’s exactly why I stayed,” I replied, nodding.
“Bullshit!” Caleb spat the word. “You stayed to protect yourself.”
I shook my head, meeting my family’s gazes head on, digesting their hurt, their betrayal, their confusion and sadness. I deserved to see their pain, but I also deserved a chance to be heard. Carefully, I explained the day Dad called me into his office and shared his story.
I explained my revulsion, placing an apologetic hand on Kara’s knee at the word. I explained my instant reaction, telling Dad to go to hell and refusing to keep his secret.
