by A. J. Downey
She took a big, cleansing breath and sighed out, and it was the sound of a woman laying her burden down, of a woman who had finally come home. I loved that sound. I loved that I could bring it out of her, and I think, to be honest, I was just plain in love with her, as scary as that sounded to me for so many reasons.
“This is nicer than anything I could ever have imagined,” she finally murmured and I smiled, laying my cheek on top of her silky hair.
“Isn’t it just?” I asked.
“It’s also very hot, and sticky,” she continued, “and the bees are going to be attracted to the honey, so we’d better move.”
I laughed and let her go and she stepped back.
I winked at her and said, “To be continued.”
Her eyes turned bright and she said, “I really like the sound of that.”
We walked together back to the riverside, and she rinsed the knife and her hands in the fast-moving water. She put the knife away in the basket and made to take it from me, but I shook my head as we resumed our initial hike.
“I’ve got it.”
She took my free hand and we walked on.
“What about you?” she asked, suddenly.
“What about me?” I asked.
“Where do you come from?”
“Born in Baltimore, raised in Indigo City.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, why? Is that hard to believe?”
“You seem really at home out here, I can’t picture you thriving in a city.”
I was a bit mollified. She stepped up on a fallen log and balanced her way across it, her arms out, yet she wouldn’t let go of my hand. I smiled and raised my arm up to help her as she navigated her way across the crumbling bark.
I nodded and said, “My granddad was a fisherman; I learned from him. If he wasn’t fishing off the wharf or out on his boat in the bay, then he was knee-deep in the closest river. Deep sea or fly fishing, it didn’t matter. He was like a junkie.”
“Yeah?” I asked.
I nodded, a bit solemn. “Yeah. He also had a really unhealthy addiction to gambling. Lost his boat, died pretty bad; owing the wrong kind of people.”
“Is that why you became a cop?” she asked, quietly.
I nodded. “Part of it. I wanted to stop those kinds of people.”
She nodded. “Then how did you get into undercover and drugs?”
“I just went where the job took me, to be honest. Drugs and gambling are kissing cousins. Both of them are under the same umbrella; that’s Vice.”
“I thought Vice was just hookers and johns.”
I chuckled but had to sigh. “A lot of those hookers are hooking because they’re addicted to drugs and trying to feed a habit. A lot of them are being trafficked. There’s a lot of money to be had when it comes to exploiting sex workers.”
She looked unhappy, a shadow passing over her face, through those eyes, and I wondered what thought had traveled through her mind and dimmed her sparkle. She heaved a sigh and said, “I guess I should feel lucky that wasn’t me‒”
I stopped her and said, “Look at me, babe.”
She looked at me, and I untangled my hand from hers and grazed her cheek with my thumb.
“There’s nothing ‘lucky’ about what you’ve been through, living like you have been, with King, or with the MC you were with before his.” I paused, and tried to figure out how to put it. “Just because someone’s had it ‘worse’ doesn’t minimize your experiences in the slightest. You’ve been through trauma, and trauma is trauma.”
She nodded and said, “I know,” turning her face into my touch, her eyes closing as if she wanted to commit every little good thing we did together to memory, as if it wouldn’t happen again, as if it needed to be savored.
It pissed me off, but I kept a lid on it because I didn’t need her thinking I was mad at her. Far from it. I was mad at the people that had put her into so many positions, time after time, to make her feel like she didn’t deserve anything good. The ones that made her feel like that was what life was, going from trauma to trauma, bad experience after bad experience, with only brief breaks of happiness in between. They’d left her so bereft that she had to find what little joy she could in the tiniest things.
That last bit was what made her so damn impressive, the fact that, despite the shit that just kept being heaped on her slender shoulders, she managed to find any happiness in life at all.
It was a rare and beautiful thing that someone could go through so much, yet hold so much hope in her heart.
I knew I certainly couldn’t do it.
I knew that I had become a pretty bitter bastard the longer I’d stayed under, and that I couldn’t work fast enough or hard enough to reach that light at the end of the tunnel. I just hadn’t expected that light to be her, and she’d been walking beside me this entire time.
“I remember the first time I saw you,” I said, as we resumed walking.
“Yeah?” she asked.
“Mm-hm.”
“At the bar, right?”
I shook my head. “Surveillance photos, actually.”
She laughed. “That doesn’t count.”
“Doesn’t it?” I asked. “Even from the photos, I feel like I got a sense of you, you know?”
She shook her head. “No. I mean, how could you? I don’t think seeing a person in a picture or on TV counts.”
“Okay, fine, then. It still wasn’t the bar.”
She frowned. “Then where was it?”
I chuckled. “The jail. I was in the visiting room when you came to see King.”
“You were?”
“Yup, talking to Driller. He was sitting right next to you at the glass. I was right next to King the whole time.”
Her puzzlement grew, her brow furrowed as she tried to remember. I had to smile, and stopped our trek and said, “You picked up the phone and put your hand to the glass and didn’t say a word, but your compassion was clear. It was a trumped-up charge, for sure, but we needed him jailed in order to facilitate a meet. My ‘saving his ass...’” I put it in air quotes. “It was all a joke, every dude in that fight was a cop. He was never in any real danger. Just needed to initiate contact in a believable way.”
She wrinkled her nose in that adorable impish way and said, “I didn’t really feel too bad about the set of raccoon eyes he walked away with,” she said. “I felt bad about not feeling bad, if that makes sense.” She thought about it for a second and said, “And I felt bad about his getting locked up, because he may have done a lot of things, but what they arrested him for? He didn’t. I figure if you’re going to be punished, it should be for something you did, right?”
“He really did kill that man, didn’t he?” I asked.
Her expression became solemn then, and she nodded. A flicker of guilt crossed her fair face and I sighed.
“I should have come forward,” she said.
“You were scared,” I said with a shrug. She nodded, but only looked more miserable, almost guilty. “Hey, it’s not your fault.”
“I didn’t want to die too,” she said plainly. “I watched him shoot that man, and it didn’t faze him.” She shivered despite the heat. “Like, at all.”
“He’s killed a lot of people, babe. He may have shot Jory Marsh, but he’s killed a lot more than that with that poison he’s peddling.”
She nodded and whispered, “I know. It was just easier not to think about it like that.”
“I never expected, in a million years, that he would think that bust had come by way of you,” I said. “What he did to you was my fault, through and through.”
“What did happen?” she asked.
I thought about it, and decided, even though I shouldn’t tell her shit, that she was on our side, and, given what she’d been through, she deserved to know.
“This conversation never happened,” I said and she rolled her eyes slightly, that Mona Lisa smile crossing her gorgeous lips that I had such a hard time keeping myself from kissi
ng.
“Who would I tell?” She asked. “You?” I chuckled and she made an ‘X’ over her heart with her finger.
I shook my head and captured her hand gently with mine, saying, “Don’t do that.”
“What?” she asked, her eyes wide.
“Cross your heart and hope to die. I so very much like you alive,” I said in a low tone, the words just between us, even though there was no one out here to hear.
She swallowed hard. “I didn’t even think about it like that,” she said evenly.
I placed her hand against my chest and she spread her fingers over the material of my soft tee-shirt. I kept it there, my hand over hers, lightly, reveling in the feeling of her touch, so new, yet so familiar already. I loved when she touched me as much as I loved touching her.
“I was being a good cop. I told my handler, Driller, what was going on. He passed it up the chain. Someone above him got it in their head to make a bust, didn’t pass it to Driller, I didn’t get any advance warning – it was a shit-show all the way around. I thought for sure my cover was blown, even though I wasn’t at the meet or the bust. I had no idea it somehow landed on you.”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t your fault,” she murmured.
“It was…”
“No, it wasn’t.” She swallowed hard and blew out a breath and said, “I think it was Grave Bass.”
“Grave Bass?” The guy was a big dude, played bass guitar. Not sure how he got ‘Grave’ as part of his road name. I did know he had a temper, but he was smart about it. He didn’t fly into fits of rage and fuck things up. No, he did shit dirtier than just knocking your damn teeth in. I could see it, but what I couldn’t see was why.
She didn't answer.
She wouldn’t make eye contact with me when she shook her head, and I could literally see her sliding back into her shell, cringing on the inside, away from an unpleasant memory.
“Hey, easy, deep breath. It’s just you and me out here, the sun, the water and the woods.”
Her gaze flicked back to mine and she looked grateful for a moment, before she rushed out, “I can still feel his hands on me when I think about it.”
I froze up but tried to lock it down, to make my face unreadable before it was too late. She touched the side of my face like I had hers, stroking her thumb just along where my skin gave way to the unruly scruff that my beard had become. In some ways, I couldn’t wait for it to go, in others, I wished I could keep it, just not in the state it was now.
“Did he hurt you?” I demanded.
“I’m okay,” she assured me. “I just don’t like thinking about it.”
“Did he rape you?” I asked, and my voice sounded hollow, even to me. I was gutted just thinking about it.
“No, but given the chance, I think he would have.” She swallowed hard and rushed the story out. She’d been coming back from the bathroom at the back of the bar and Grave Bass had stopped her in the narrow hall on his way back to the john. He’d pinned her in the corner by the old, all-but-defunct payphone and had cupped her pussy through her skirt. He’d said a bunch of seriously lewd and ludicrous shit and had scared the ever-living shit out of Everleigh.
He’d been drunk, but that hadn’t excused it. You never touched or hit on another brother’s old lady. You never fucked with a man’s property like that. It was enough to net yourself the ass-whoopin’ of the century, at a bare minimum. At the worst, it put your ass out-bad with the club. Depended on the club and their tolerance for drama. King and the Knights of Crescentia had none.
You could look, within reason, and your thoughts were your own. If you didn’t get caught looking too much, and you didn’t voice those thoughts or act on them, then who was to say? Grave Bass had grossly overstepped.
“You didn’t tell King, did you?” I asked, finally.
She shook her head and gave me the answer I was expecting, “With how tight the brothers are, and how much he’d been using, I was afraid it would somehow end up my fault. You know?”
I nodded. I did know. It was a man’s world through and through, and a woman, even the president’s woman, was at the bottom. We all knew shit rolled downhill. She looked away from me again, her bright green gaze somehow dimming as the shadows of memory flitted behind them.
She stared at nothing when she said, “I thought if I kept it to myself, everything would be okay.”
“But Grave Bass probably sobered the fuck up, got real insecure about it, and put a bug in King’s ear and let King’s drug-induced paranoia take care of the rest,” I supplied.
“That was my thought, yes.”
“Coward wasn’t even fuckin’ there,” I muttered.
I closed my eyes, pained for her, and she shuddered, her hand slipping from beneath my hand, from against my chest.
She said quietly, “Are we anywhere near this swimming hole of yours? I could really use to get in the water.”
I couldn’t blame her. If I were her, I’d want to wash the stain of those memories away, too. I smiled with a bit of a false brightness as I tried to swallow and digest everything she’d told me and said, “Yeah, actually. We’re here.”
18
Everleigh…
The water was cool and refreshing, but after only a few moments in it, it grew to be almost too cold. I was letting it hold most of my weight, but was twined around Narcos’ fit, inked body, my legs wrapped around his waist, my hands on the swell of his shoulders. His big hands resting against my back stabilized me as we talked over the sound of the river tumbling over rocks into this pool.
It wasn’t just a swimming hole; there was a waterfall, too, and it was unbelievably beautiful here. I loved it.
“We need to talk about later this week,” he said, and I felt my mood sink a little.
“What about it?” I asked, pointedly.
He chuckled and said, “Look, I don’t want to deal with it this soon, either, but it’s happening, whether we like it or not.”
“I know,” I said unhappily, and he sighed, shifting one hand from my back to my hip as he spun us lazily in the pool.
“I don’t know how many of the guys Driller’s bringing with him, but it’s a long ride and they’re probably going to want to stay the night. Go over some things when they get here, and a few more before they take off the next morning.”
“And?”
“And ‒ that means we need to have someplace to put them up, or you up… This has become your space for the time being, so what’ll it be? We moving you up into the loft, or are they crashing up there?”
“There’s a lot of stuff up there,” I said.
“I know, which is why, either way, we got our work cut out for us over the next couple of days.”
I chewed my bottom lip and thought about it and finally said, “I’d rather they stay in the loft; I’ll stay on the porch with you.”
He shook his head sadly and said, “You’re a witness…”
I blinked and realized, Oh shit… he could lose everything, being with you, Everleigh.
“Oh…” I trailed off and felt the blood drain from my face.
“Hey, no, don’t do that. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“No, I get it,” I said quickly. “Being with me, you could be sanctioned, fired, or whatever. Lose everything you’ve worked for… I don’t want to see that happen.”
I let him go but he didn’t let me go, just walked us both to where I could stand in the pool, too and we could talk. Although, I suddenly didn’t so much feel like talking. I suddenly just wanted my clothes, and to go back to the cabin.
“Don’t for one minute think I am treating this as just some sort of fling, babe. That isn’t what this is,” he said, suddenly so very serious.
I met his eyes with mine, slightly defiant, which was more just me trying to be guarded. He sighed again, and looked unhappy – though not with me, more at himself.
“Do I want to lose my job? No. Do I want you? With everything I am.” He put one hand against his ches
t, the other resting still against my back as I shivered in the river water. It was cold, not being tucked against his warmth, like I was.
“You can’t have your cake and eat it, too,” I murmured and he frowned at me.
“The fuck I can’t,” he said. He searched my face and looked uncertain for a moment. Finally he shook his head and said, “Look, I know I don’t have any right to ask, and this is totally up to you, but as much as I fucking hate the idea… I can only think of one solution.”
“Let me guess: hide what we have between us until after the trial is over?”
He nodded and he looked like he genuinely felt like shit for even asking. I pressed my lips together and took a deep breath. It was a shit thing to ask, and I was angry, but I couldn’t say that I was angry specifically at him. I was angry at the whole situation, at the whole world for letting me down, time and time again, but if it was one thing I’d become good at over the years, it was plucking myself up after one of these pity-parties and forging ahead. It was just a matter of deciding, in my heart of hearts, what was best and how to proceed.
I closed my eyes and twin tears slipped beneath my lids and spilled in scalding lines down my cheeks.
“Don’t clam up on me now, babe. Talk to me.”
“I’m just so tired of everything,” I said, my voice trembling. “If it’s not this, it’s that; if it’s not that, it’s another thing, and I am just so tired of going through it.”
He captured my face between his hands and tipped my head back so I would look at him. I opened my eyes and sniffed and he looked me over, his eyes fierce, his expression set in undeniable determination.
“You aren’t going to go through it alone, babe. I’m here, I’m right here, and I’m not going anywhere.”
I looked at him, desperately wanting to believe, but I’d heard such empty assurances before, and here I was, with him, not them… And there’s no place you’d rather be.