by Penelope Sky
Now I realized I couldn’t do this without him.
I needed him like I needed air.
I stemmed my tears and made the call, the phone pressed to my ear as I watched people walk up and down the sidewalk. It was a sunny day and the temperature was mild. The phone rang as I waited for him to answer.
When it seemed like voice mail was about to pick up, he answered. “What is it?” Fiery and pissed off, he sounded like his day wasn’t going well. Men spoke in the background, running their mouths as they argued about something.
“Uh…everything okay?”
“Arwen, I’ve got shit to do, and I don’t have time for a heartfelt conversation. Call me when you actually need something.”
Shocked by the cold way he spoke to me, I was nearly speechless. Tears were in my eyes once again, and the shock constricted my throat. It was difficult to get any words out, so I was only able to say one. “Okay…”
He hung up.
I set the phone in the center console and felt the tears burn my eyes. Drops of sorrow ran down my cheeks, and I felt stupid for calling him. Maybe I could never trust Maverick to be the same person every single day. He changed too much, flipped a switch without notice. I wiped my tears away and got on the road, my chest tight because of the pain.
My phone started to ring. His name was on the screen.
I was in full sobbing mode, so I ignored it, wanting nothing to do with him. I was an idiot for thinking I could call and ask him for support. I’d become used to his kindness, but I’d forgotten how quickly it evaporated.
He called again.
I ignored it.
I was just a few miles from the cemetery when he called for the third time. He’d ended our conversation so abruptly that I didn’t understand why he wanted to talk to me so much now. Did he realize he was an ass the second he hung up on me?
I got tired of listening to the phone ring through the car system, so I answered. “What?” I kept my voice strong and disguised my tears as best as possible, but I was still heartbroken that the one person I relied on was so cold to me. I shouldn’t have allowed myself to count on him in the first place.
There was a long pause. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing…” This time, I could hear silence in the background, as if he’d excused himself from whatever business he was doing to give me more than a few seconds of his time. Hot tears rolled down my face and slowly approached my lips, full of my heartbreak. Now I wasn’t sure what I was more miserable about—the date or my husband.
“Your GPS shows you leaving Florence but going in the opposite direction of the house. Where are you going?”
I didn’t care to answer him. “I know you’re busy, Maverick. I’ll just talk to you later.” Now I couldn’t disguise my tears, and they escaped in my voice, carrying my devastation on my vocal cords.
“Sheep.” He stopped me from hanging up on him with just his voice. “I’m sorry I was an ass, alright? I’ve just got a lot on my plate right now.”
“That’s fine. I’ll let you go—”
“Don’t you fucking hang up on me.”
I drove farther into the countryside, the flowers in the passenger seat.
“Talk to me, Sheep. What’s going on?”
“It’s my father’s birthday… I was going to the cemetery to visit. I thought maybe…never mind. I know you have more important things to do, so I’ll talk to you later.” Before he could yell at me through the speakers, I hung up.
I kept driving and didn’t hear the phone ring.
The fight was over.
When I approached the gates, he called me again.
If he called me just to scream at me for hanging up on him, I’d crash this nice car into a tree just to piss him off. “What?”
He took a long pause. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, alright?”
That wasn’t what I expected him to say. “You don’t have to—”
“I want to.”
“Maverick, it sounds like you’re busy. I’m sure you have things to do.”
“You’re more important. You’re always more important…and I’m sorry I didn’t make that clear.”
When he arrived fifteen minutes later, I got out of my car with my flowers in hand. I’d cleaned up my makeup as best as I could in the car, but the puffiness of my eyes couldn’t be hidden. The mascara had dissolved into my skin and gave it a blue tint that made me look particularly pale. That morning, I’d thought my makeup and hair had turned out perfect…but now I looked like a train wreck.
Maverick looked exactly the same as usual, masculine, fit, and strong. With his brown eyes glued to my face, he walked toward me, dressed in a black t-shirt with matching jeans. His shiny watch was on his wrist, and his jeans fit his muscular legs perfectly. Apology was in his gaze, like he knew he’d fucked up.
I was embarrassed that I’d called him in the first place, that I’d allowed a man to understand how much I needed him. If it were anyone else, I would keep my pride and never shed a tear. When Dante dumped me, I didn’t have a reaction. Even when Dante was mine, I never asked him for anything. He came to the hospital to comfort me, but he did that entirely on his own. I was a proud woman who refused to admit any kind of weakness. But since the beginning, it’d been different with Maverick. I relied on him like a wife relied on her husband.
He came to my side, and his arm immediately wrapped around my waist. He took the flowers from my hand and pulled me in for a gentle kiss on the lips. It was the first time he’d greeted me like I actually meant something to him, the first time he’d held me like his wife under the sun.
He pulled away then guided me to my father’s resting place.
He placed the flowers on the grave, directly under my father’s name. Then he came to my side and wrapped his arm around my waist once more, becoming my rock the way he was last time. He squeezed me into his side and stayed quiet, not re-opening the conversation we’d had in the car.
I stared at my father’s name and felt new tears emerge. “He was only fifty-seven…” He’d died so young, far too soon. Maybe if he’d seen a doctor sooner, things would have been different. Maybe he wanted it to be this way because he knew he didn’t have any other options. My hand covered my mouth to stifle my tears when they became too much. I’d already grieved at his funeral and in the weeks afterward. Now, it started all over again, like a scab that had been picked at until it bled. “He would be fifty-eight today.”
Maverick’s hand squeezed my waist, holding me close to him as the tears streamed down my cheeks. He kept his silence, letting me cry and express my pain.
My mother’s name was next to my father’s, and sometimes I couldn’t believe that she’d been gone for so long. Five years came and went. I hoped they were together in heaven, their spirits playing in the clouds.
I stood there for thirty minutes, and not once did Maverick say a word or drop his comfort. He was there for me just the way he was before. If he had somewhere to be, he didn’t admit it. It seemed like he had all day to stand there beside me.
When my tears finally ran dry and my heart was stitched back together, I turned away. “I’m ready to go…” I turned my back on the grave and walked to the black car, wondering how my father would feel about Maverick if he were still alive. When Caspian wanted to kill me, Maverick stayed on my side. It was something I had to remember on his bad days, that he was a good man underneath that hostility.
He walked me to my car door. “You want to get something to eat? Something to get your mind thinking about something else?”
I didn’t have an appetite at all. The only thing I wanted to do was go home and press my fingers to the keys of the piano. Music got me through my darkest times. “No. I think I’m just going to go home.” I opened the door.
He closed it. “I’m here. Use me.” He placed his body in front of the door so I couldn’t open it again. He forced me to back up, to move to the rear of the car. We were the only visitors to the cemetery, so we
could have any conversation we wanted. Not even the dead could hear us. “I’m sorry I was an ass to you before. If I’d known you needed me, I wouldn’t have talked to you that way.”
“How about you just stop talking that way anyway? Sounds like a good rule of thumb.” The criticism flew out of my mouth quickly, my suppressed rage taking the reins.
He obviously pitied me when he didn’t fire back. “I’ll work on it…”
I was frustrated about my life, disappointed this was where I’d ended up. Both of my parents were gone, and I was married to a man who would never be more than my friend and occasional lover. My life felt stale.
He studied me, one hand resting on top of the car. “If it makes any difference, I really do feel like shit. I hate watching you cry…”
“You told me you liked it.”
“In a very different context.” He lowered his hand, his eyes still focused on me. “I wouldn’t have picked you over my father if I didn’t care about you. Hearing your tears through the phone was like glass scraping against a chalkboard.”
“If that’s the case, stop flipping back and forth. Stop being kind to me one minute and then cold the next.”
“Sorry…it’s just how I am.”
“Well, that’s not how you should be with me. You can trust me and I can trust you. We’re all each other has now…”
That seemed to mean something to him because his eyes softened. He went from being a brooding man to being a kind soul. “I’ve never been married before…I’m not sure how this works.”
“If you aren’t going to kill me, then this is a lifetime commitment. That means we need to be good to each other, every single day. We need to be there for each other. We need to trust each other. Stop keeping me at a distance, and let me in. I’m the most reliable person in your life right now.”
He fit in with the Tuscan countryside behind him, a beautiful Italian man with great appreciation for the soil, the trees, and the gorgeous landscape that surrounded us every day. He drank wine like water, he perfected cheese for a living, and he knew how to make love like a man passionately in love. “I’m not good at letting people in. I don’t think I’ll ever be good at it.”
“Why not?”
He turned his gaze and surveyed the fields around us, Florence in the distance. “I’ve lost my mother…my sister…and now my father. I’ve had my heart broken too many times.”
“But you haven’t lost your sister and your father.”
“My sister is a completely different person now. Our relationship isn’t the same. Memories that I have with my family will need to be locked in a vault because I’ll never make new ones. My mother was the nucleus that held us all together, and the second she was gone, we all broke apart. I don’t need to explain that my father is different too…that I’m not a son to him. Even the tightest relationships fall apart. Friends say they’ll be close forever, and then life gets in the way…and they don’t speak for years. Nothing ever stays the same, nothing is ever concrete. The people you love are the ones you lose.” It was the longest monologue he’d ever given me, an open window into the clouded thoughts in his mind. He displayed his vulnerability and finally spoke his mind freely, showing me his old wounds and how painful they still were.
I understood his pain because I’d lost both of my parents, but he had a different kind of pain that I’d never had to carry. When my mother was gone, my father was still there. But every member of his family quickly disappeared, like they’d never been there at all. He couldn’t take a compliment because he hardly ever received them, and he couldn’t accept love because he hadn’t gotten that either. His mother’s death had traumatized him in so many ways. Now he was afraid to let me in, let anyone in, because it seemed pointless. “I’m not going anywhere, Maverick.”
He didn’t blink as he looked at me. “Doesn’t matter. My father and sister haven’t gone anywhere…but they aren’t the same.”
6
Maverick
It was an unusually cool evening, so I started a fire.
The flames leaped to life in the hearth and filled my bedroom with enough warmth to push the cold air through the cracks in the windows. With a glass of scotch in my hand, I took a drink as I sat up in bed, watching the flames dance.
The second I yelled at Arwen on the phone, I’d felt like shit.
Especially when I heard the tears.
I wasn’t sympathetic or compassionate, but something about her pain tore me up inside. I couldn’t stand it. When she sang or spoke, it was the most beautiful sound. But her tears were another story.
Work had been a nightmare because we’d increased production and made errors in the process. As a result, we lost an entire batch of product and wasted the entire day. My temperature was running hot, and she called at the wrong time.
I guess I should have controlled my anger better.
I’d never been good at that sort of thing.
A knock sounded on my bedroom door. My hand returned the glass to the nightstand, and I stared at the door, knowing Abigail wasn’t the one on the other side. Arwen hadn’t texted me, but she was more comfortable stopping by my bedroom when she assumed I didn’t have company. “Come in.”
She opened the door and came inside, in her sleep shorts with messy hair. She continued to grip the handle as she lingered in the doorway. Even though her eyes were on the bed, she didn’t immediately dive for it.
I was in my boxers as I sat on the mattress, getting ready for bed even though I wasn’t tired. Now that she’d walked in the door, wearing shorts that let her ass hang out, I was even less tired. But after the day we’d had, I suspected she wasn’t in the mood for sex. And after being such an ass, I would be wrong to demand it.
She continued to stand at the door, like she was afraid to ask for what she wanted.
I grabbed the sheets beside me and pushed them down, inviting her to sleep.
She shut the door then crawled into my bed. Her sexy legs disappeared under the cotton sheets, and she pulled the hair tie out of her ponytail so the strands would come free across the pillow. Her eyes were still puffy from all the crying she’d done that afternoon. No amount of makeup could cover it.
I slid down under the sheets then turned off the lamp at my bedside. When the room was blanketed in darkness, the flames illuminated the walls. The gentle crackle and pop of the fire filled the silence.
She looked at the flames before she looked at me again. “Can I sleep with you tonight?”
My wife needed me, and I’d be a dick if I kicked her out. “Yeah.”
She stuck to her side of the bed and didn’t try to cuddle with me.
I didn’t care to show affection to a woman. There was only kissing and touching before sex. Then there was just fucking. After the fun part was over, there was no reason to share another embrace. She stuck to her side of the bed, and I stuck to mine.
But I knew that wasn’t what she wanted.
What she needed.
I scooted closer to her and wrapped my arm around her waist, bringing us close together under the sheets. The curve of her back was so prominent that it was easy to slide my arm into place, easy to drag her closer into me.
Her eyes opened and she visibly melted, like affection was all she needed. She rested her head against mine with her hand on my chest. Her eyes closed again, and she breathed a happy sigh, like she this was all the medicine she needed to heal.
My fingers moved into her hair, and I gently pulled the strands away from her face, showing her almond-shaped eyes and those full lips. I’d never been with a woman more than a couple of times, and I’d never slept with a woman without actually fucking her. But Arwen was a very rare exception.
She was the only woman who could get my attention and keep it.
She was the only woman who could call and ask for anything.
She was the only woman I would choose over my father.
Because she was my wife.
She carried my name and my ring, i
dentifying herself as my property everywhere she went. It increased my social standing and gave me a sense of pride. I was heartless and idiotic at times, but I knew I had a trophy on my hands.
A priceless heirloom.
“Thank you for coming today,” she whispered into the darkness, her voice barely louder than the sound of the flames.
“I’ll always be there for you, Sheep.” Now that I’d turned my back on my father, I really had to keep her safe. She had two enemies lurking in the darkness, two monsters that blended in with the shadows. I had to stay on guard and keep watching, protect my little sheep from being eaten.
Protect my little wife.
“You’re all I have in this world…and I’m so glad my father made me marry you.”
She’d despised me when we met. I could see it in her eyes, not just hear it in her words. She was the most combative woman I’d ever known, sparking an attitude from gasoline and flames. She had the fierceness that would make her a good crime lord of the underworld. Now she was singing a much different tune…turning a new key. She’d softened like a rose petal as it fell off the bud. She was delicate without her roots, vulnerable to the world around her. But she let me take care of her…needed me to take care of her. It made my dick hard to listen to her openly need me, to admit I was the only man she could rely on. It didn’t just inflate my ego. It made me feel valuable.
“I didn’t know what I wanted in a husband…until I met you.”
“I didn’t realize how much you liked to socialize.” She rose out of the car and took my hand for balance. She was in a skintight dark blue dress with a mermaid cut. A diamond necklace hung around her throat, complementing the wedding ring on her left hand.
“Can’t stand it.” I tossed the keys to the valet then circled my arm around her waist. “But that’s how the real world works. Money likes to talk to money.” I guided her up the steps and down the long path that led to the front of the house. It was already lit up inside, people chatting in the windows.
“Wow, this place is beautiful.”