Too Hard to Forget (Romancing the Clarksons Book 3)

by Tessa Bailey

  It wasn’t necessarily her tender rump that forced her to keep shifting around while twirling spaghetti onto a fork, though. Her reaction to being punished was what continued to trap words in her mouth, like fireflies in a jar.

  Okay, so she had a kink. One that had been unintentionally discovered and fostered by Elliott. She liked to be bossed around in the sack, except…she’d only ever enjoyed it with the coach. Technically, the only way she could have a satisfying orgasm was to have that discipline doled out by him. Just one man.

  What happened in the office didn’t feel like it did before. At twenty-two, the spankings, Elliott’s domination, had been about sex. Right? About lust for one particular man? Just now, though, as she’d bent over the desk and taken those slaps to her bottom, she’d felt a click unlike anything she remembered. A registering in her mind that she was getting her due. Being punished for something, rather than being punished for pleasure. Yes, there had been the sticky hot bliss of orgasm shooting from her internal firearm, but something in her mind hadn’t allowed the bullet to strike.

  Had she experienced the same foreboding at twenty-two, but her younger self hadn’t recognized it? Or perhaps, in the blinding bright white glow of infatuation, the invisible grip on her spine had been equated with something new and exciting. But in the office it had felt…wrong. All wrong.

  Between her thighs, she was still damp. In fact, every time she caught a whiff of Elliott’s apples and mint scent, her vagina muscles seized. The way they do when your stomach lifts during a roller coaster and you can’t breathe, squeezing your legs together until it drops back into place. But there was a new layer, too. Like a thin red lining to her attraction, throbbing with light.

  She’d bent over for that spanking because something in her psyche craved Elliott’s anger. His disapproval. Not just the façade of it, though. The real thing. That click she’d heard, clear as day, had been like shaking hands with a villain and recognizing her foe. Some part of her she’d grown to despise since sitting down at the table…enjoyed Elliott making her feel bad. Believed he was right.

  And that. That was not okay.

  Peggy glanced up from her meal to find Elliott observing her over the rim of his glass. Milk. He’d exchanged the beer she’d brought him for the wholesome white stuff, and she suddenly wanted to slap it out of his hands. She’d come back to Cincinnati to jar him into realizing what he’d lost. To make him pine and lust, so she could ride into the sunset knowing she’d had the last laugh, after years of misery. She would have broken Elliott’s hold on her. The control would be in her hands, instead of the other way around.

  But in that moment, even with her soaked panties clinging to her flesh, she wondered if this Ohio detour was a huge waste of her time. Perhaps three years had earned her some perspective or taught her about human nature. Because the curtains were lifting to reveal what her heart should have been telling her all along, instead of mourning the loss of her first love. Elliott didn’t deserve her.

  All those times during their relationship when she’d stumbled her way through pulling him from black moments…and he’d never done the same for her. She’d been stuck in a perpetual one for three years and he hadn’t come. Hadn’t appreciated her enough. He’d made her feel like a weakness, a transgression unfit for anyone else, but all this time he’d been unfit. Not her. A man who took her love and made it something ugly. Maybe her crusade to make him miserable was overkill. Elliott already was miserable…and perhaps she should simply leave him to it.

  Until that moment, moving on had seemed like a distant goal, but now…now it was close enough to grasp.

  She would explore this more later, but right now, she had a dinner to get through. Alice sat to her left, staring down glumly at her own food, probably lamenting her impulsiveness at inviting someone over for dinner who’d turned out to be lamer than dry wheat toast.

  “Alice,” Peggy started, coughing into her fist when it sounded like she’d just guzzled ice chips. “How did rehearsal go after I left?”

  “Fine.” She sat up a little straighter in her chair. “Mostly the girls were asking about Belmont, so that was good. He distracted them from my social suicide.”

  Peggy chuckled. “I won’t tell him he caused a stir. He wouldn’t know how to react and we’d get trapped under a frown avalanche.”

  “Huh. I think that’s why I liked him,” Alice said, stabbing at her spaghetti. “He’s different. Like me.”

  “Yeah,” Peggy responded softly, kind of shaken up over having Alice echo her words from earlier. The ones she’d lobbed through the bathroom door in the auditorium, praying they found their mark. Had she actually made some kind of difference? She hoped so, because there was something about Elliott’s daughter that was so authentically beautiful, Peggy hated the idea of her spirit being nicked by the cruelty of others. And even though she knew it shouldn’t, even though the thought bubble trying to float into her consciousness was the kind that could burst too easily, it entered anyway.

  Alice needs a mother.

  Not Peggy, obviously. Hell to the no. Someone else. Someone without obsessive hang-ups on unavailable men or the newfound realization that she thinks herself in need of chastisement. No, Alice needed a woman with the warmth and steadfastness Peggy didn’t have. All she had was a great fashion sense, the ability to recite entire episodes of Golden Girls, and apparently a knack for impersonating a theater coach.

  Knowing she could never be the kind of woman who would bring stubborn Elliott and Alice together, right on the heels of the realization she’d developed something unhealthy inside of her, had Peggy wanting to make a breezy excuse to leave. Talk about being clobbered. She couldn’t even get a bite of food down her gullet and it didn’t help that the perfect amount of spice and garlic reminded her of Miriam. Oh God, what would her mother think if she could see her? Breaking bread with the man who’d shattered her heart just as soundly. Punishing herself on purpose.

  “Peggy,” Elliott’s rasping voice broke into her thoughts. “You’ve barely eaten.”

  “I—yeah. Look at that.” She tapped the fork against her plate, sending a tinny sound winging through the room. “I think I tested the sauce a few too many times and filled up.”

  Elliott’s own eating utensil was paused on the table, held tightly between two thick fingers. “You should try.”

  “Stop,” she whispered.

  When silence seemed to boom loudly from her left, Peggy looked over at Alice, who was transferring a narrow-eyed glance between her and Elliott. “Um.” The preteen took a long sip of her soda. “Dad said you were a professor at the university, Peggy?”

  The air in the dining room went very brittle, stagnant, but Peggy didn’t pause before answering because she didn’t need to think about telling the truth. Not this time. You didn’t attempt to build someone’s confidence and get to know a private part of them—the way she’d done that afternoon with Alice—and then lie to them. Or lie more, rather. “No, I’m not.” She took the napkin from her lap and laid it down carefully on the table, noticing Elliott did the same. “I’m here for alumni weekend. I was a student, back in the diz-ay.” Her attempt at levity smashed to pieces on the ground. “Just here to see old friends.”

  “But how do you know my dad?” Daughter scrutinized father. “As long as we’ve lived in this house, no one has been inside of it besides us and a couple repairmen and my aunt. You’ve been in it twice. So you have to know him…somehow. I just…” She shook her head and Peggy saw a resemblance to Elliott in her frustration. “When did you graduate?”

  Oh now. Now they were on shaky ground. Elliott seemed to realize it, too, but like Peggy, he seemed disinclined to fabricate a story. There was no pretense in his gaze, only resignation. “Peggy graduated three years ago.”

  A puff of air left Alice’s mouth. “That’s the year after Mom died. Or the year we took her off life support anyway.” She laid her right hand flat on the table. “Did you two…have a relationship?”
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  A buzz of silence met Alice’s question and then the twelve-year-old was pushing away from the table, knocking her chair onto the ground. “Oh my God.” She leveled her next question at Elliott with the kind of brutality only a preteen can muster. “You probably wanted Mom to die, didn’t you?”

  “Alice.” Elliott’s voice was steady, even though his eyes were turbulent. “Sit down and we’ll talk about this calmly.”

  “No. No. Everything we do is calm and I don’t always feel calm. Actually, I never, ever feel that way.”

  It felt as though a manacle were cinching tighter and tighter around Peggy’s throat, but she managed to speak past the pressure. “Alice…what happened. It was after. Not during. And—”

  “I thought you were here for me.” Alice broke off with an awful keening noise that had Peggy shoving to her feet, but she froze on a dime with the girl’s next words. “Stop. You’re just some mistress, or a…whore.”

  “Alice.”

  Elliott’s voice boomed the way it only did on the sidelines, sending his daughter falling back three steps, hand flying up to cover her mouth. For Peggy’s part, she didn’t move. Couldn’t move. A tremor started in her midsection and grew more intense until she swore she had to breathe in and out through her nose or risk vomiting.

  Elliott slammed his fist into the table, clattering the plates. “Apologize, Alice.”

  “She doesn’t have to,” Peggy forced out between numb lips, refusing to break the furious gaze Elliott turned on her. “I’m going to just…”

  Peggy eased out of the scene, as if she were the only component that hadn’t been paused in some gruesome family portrait. Regret pushed down on her lungs. Being called a vile word by someone she liked caused a thick ripple of pain. An invisible sword made entirely of shame tried to prod her, too, but she forced armor to close around herself, welding it shut so nothing else could hitch a ride. As soon as she reached the hallway leading to the front door, she heard running feet and a slammed door behind her, presumably Alice locking herself in her room for all eternity.

  Feeling like a stone statue walking for the very first time, Peggy moved through the door, into the night, unfamiliarity bombarding her from all sides. Houses she’d never seen, cars full of people she didn’t know, a sky that looked so different from San Diego’s sky, it seemed to be projected from a television screen.

  She had no idea how long she’d been walking when Elliott pulled his truck up alongside her, parking at the curb and getting out. Following her.

  “Peggy.”

  “You should be home with Alice. She needs you.”

  “You need me.”

  Peggy halted and turned slowly, eyebrows somewhere near the clouds. “Huh?”

  “You need me to drive you back to the hotel,” Elliott clarified. When Peggy made no move to climb into the truck or even respond—and honestly, she wasn’t sure if she could respond to anything every again—Elliott tapped a closed fist on the hood. “I need to take you back, too. It would drive me crazy knowing you were walking around in the dark under normal circumstances. But after that…after that, I won’t have you alone in the dark. Thinking about it.”

  “And you’re going to distract me, are you?” She heard the invitation dripping from her voice and hated herself for going there, like it was some kind of unavoidable default. “Forget I said that, okay? Just forget everything I’ve said since I got here.”

  “I’ll try and fake it, if you get in the truck.”

  That spun a laugh around in her throat. “Wait. Let me say one more thing before we start faking.” She started toward the truck, moving past him and resting one hand on the door. “I came here to make you miserable, just for old times’ sake. Okay? You were right about all of it. I thought I could get you out of my system if I was the one to end things this time around. But it turns out, I might have already accomplished that.” She yanked on the door handle, heaving a sigh when she found it locked. The impediment, however, spurred the rest of her confession. “We’re bad for each other. I finally believe what you’ve always told me. So I’m done now. Maybe we can just be…nice to one another until I leave.”

  Appearing to be in a daze, Elliott lifted his keys and pressed a button to unlock the door, allowing Peggy to climb inside and click her seatbelt closed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Elliott couldn’t feel his hands around the steering wheel. He should probably pull over, but then he would have to confront what Peggy said before he was ready.

  Yeah, like he would ever be ready.

  The times he’d accused Peggy of coming back to Cincinnati—or hell, being put on this earth—to make him miserable, he’d meant it in terms of temptation. Trying his faith, his convictions, his routine. Had he meant those callous words, though? Or were they just a practiced speech from three years ago, when she’d blazed her light through the darkest period of his life? Back then, her sympathy and understanding had made him feel one of two ways. Healed. Whole. Or like she’d thrown salt in his open wounds.

  Right now, his wounds were bleeding, but Peggy hadn’t been the one to put them there. Had he made her believe otherwise? She’d stumbled on a broken beast in the woods and tried to bandage him up, but he’d bitten her instead. Continued to bite her. The way he’d felt about Peggy had been a thorn in his paw. His own wife had never been on the receiving end of those feelings, and as a result, she’d died alone.

  Peggy had merely come to him at the wrong time. He’d looked at her and seen his own shame. Had it reflected back off him and trapped her, too?

  Whore.

  His insides were on fire at the memory of her face, how her positive energy faded into the expression of someone who’d walked into a brick wall.

  It was the same way she’d looked after he’d spanked her in his office.

  He pulled into the hotel parking lot, watching the headlights crawl along the black asphalt, and experienced the sinking horror that he’d been living in darkness himself, failing to switch on even the smallest lamp to see what was around him. Three years. She’d been gone three years. And it felt like she’d left yesterday. But she hadn’t—and while he’d numbed himself to the reality of her stark absence, Peggy had been living without painkillers. She’d been living in awareness this whole time.

  His blood ran cold when he tried to imagine what that felt like. How he would have been living if he’d allowed himself to fully register the fact that he’d sent her away. Sent her away to California.

  “Thanks for the ride.”

  Peggy pushed open the door and started to climb out of the truck, but Elliott—needing to have himself in motion—rounded the truck’s rear end before she could vanish into one of five hundred rooms, the number to which he probably wouldn’t be able to find out. “Hold up.”

  She riffled through her purse and removed a pack of gum, popping a little white tab into her mouth with a sigh. “I’m not one of your players.”

  “Peggy, if I’m aware of one thing, it’s that.” She’d obviously had a pep talk with herself in the truck while he’d been brewing in his own shit. He could see it in the determined set of her shoulders, the forced flippancy in her eyes. But for the first time in seemingly forever, Elliott was desperate to reach someone on a level that had nothing to do with football. To reach into Peggy’s mind and rearrange something that had been put in the wrong place, thanks to him. “If you were one of my players, I would know what to do here. I’d be capable.” He took her shoulders and watched her chin lift, felt her inhale deep in his bones. “That name you were called tonight is so far beneath you, Peggy, you shouldn’t even be aware it exists. I need you to nod and tell me you understand that.”

  Humming in her throat, she looked away. “That word is beneath anyone.” She exhaled. “I know she didn’t mean it, okay? Maybe she’ll mean it for the next decade, but someday when she’s an adult, she’ll understand. I…hope she does.”

  “I’m going to make sure she does.”

  For a few
beats, Peggy just watched him. He would have felt awkward standing between two parked cars in silence with anyone else. No doubt he would have made an excuse to get back in his truck and leave. But the quiet felt like due course with Peggy. A lead up to something else he didn’t want to miss. “There’s a park around back of the hotel.” A puff of cold breath hung in the air near her mouth. “You want to go for a walk?”

  Normally, he would say no, even if he wanted to remain with her long as possible. But he wanted to say yes to the walk. Had a sick feeling that he should have said yes a lot more often to this woman. Too late, though, wasn’t he? He’d turned on a small lamp in his dark room way too late—and he was afraid to turn on any more. To see what he might reveal. His hesitation brought the glazed quality back to her eyes, though, and an answering stab in his chest pushed a single word out. “Yeah.”

  Elliott moved to put himself between Peggy and any cars that might drive through the parking lot as they walked, wondering if she was laughing on the inside over him being old school. If so, she didn’t betray it on her face. There was only surprise arranging her features, probably over his agreement to go for a walk. Elliott could barely believe it himself, truthfully. Any time spent with Peggy was an opportunity to slip into a bad habit.

  Bad habit. That’s how he’d always seen her. Spoken to her. Touched her.

  Thank God she’d finally realized he was bad for her. Thank God.

  As they entered the deserted park, Elliott realized his lungs were burning from lack of oxygen and he tried to be discreet about filling them. “So.” He rolled his neck, trying to match Peggy’s casual pace on the path, even though his usual fast stride tried to send him ahead. “You’re traveling with only your brother?”

  “My best friend, Sage, is here, too. She’s a wedding planner.” Peggy glanced up at the hotel. “She texted me earlier to let me know she spent the day visiting venues in town, just to get ideas. This whole trip is about my family and she has been so patient with us. I don’t deserve her.”