by Dena Christy
“What did you do?” Logan leaned his hip against the bar and folded his arms across his chest.
Alex gave the bar one last wipe and glanced at Logan.
“I didn’t do anything. She decided that things weren’t going to work, and she decided that we were better off not together.”
And he had been blindsided by the whole thing, and frankly couldn’t figure out what the fuck he could have done differently to make the outcome change.
“And you’re just going to let it go like that? You’re just going to let her go?”
“I will not stalk her until she decides we can get back together if that’s what you’re suggesting.” What was he supposed to do? He’d tried to be reasonable with her, to tell her that what she was afraid of wouldn’t happen, but she wouldn’t listen. She’d shut him out and he couldn’t find his way past the wall she’d thrown up in front of him. And deep down, he didn’t think he was ever going to break through it, so what was the point of trying?
“What about your baby? Are you going to walk away from it too?”
Alex glared at Logan. “Since you are intent on having a discussion about this, I’d like to know who I am talking to. Are you here as my alpha, my boss or my friend?”
“I’m here as your friend.”
“Then fuck you for suggesting that I’m going to walk away from my baby. I already made it clear to Mercy that I was going to be a part of that child’s life.” Alex threw the rag in his hand down onto the countertop. If this was Logan’s idea of a friendly chat, then he sucked at it because all it was doing to was making him mad. And Logan had known him long enough that he should have known that there was no way in hell he was going to walk away from his child.
“I meant no offense. I don’t know what happened between the two of you, and maybe you decided to cut your losses completely. I’m sorry for suggesting that you’d walk away from your kid. I just thought that if you could easily walk away from the woman you love, then maybe you could walk away from your baby too.”
“You think it was easy to walk away from her?”
“You did it, didn’t you? It couldn’t have been that hard.”
Alex’s lip curled for a second, and the only thing that stopped him from shoving his way past Logan and telling him to fuck off was the fact that besides being his friend, he was his alpha and his boss.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s easy for you since you have Faith and your son and your family is growing. Your life is perfect, but not everyone has that.”
Logan threw his head back and laughed. “You think my life is perfect? Sorry, but nobody’s life is perfect. Do you remember when my father got his hands on Faith? When I almost lost her because that bastard didn’t want me mating with a human and fucking things up with the pack?”
This was a change of direction, but Alex would rather go with it because it took the conversation off him and Mercy. “Yeah. Why are you bringing it up? You got to her in time and didn’t lose her.”
“The truth is I almost lost her before my father got his hands on her. I kept secrets from her and she found out about them, and not in a way that endeared me to her. And because I was a bonehead, and couldn’t tell her that I loved her and wanted to do whatever it took to make things work with her, she walked out on me. And I didn’t know it at the time, but she walked away with my baby inside her. Fortunately, fate was smiling down on me and I got her back. But don’t for one second think that I didn’t have to fight for the so-called perfect life you think I have.”
“I’m sorry for saying that your life is perfect. I know there is no such thing as perfect.” And his own life was so far from perfect that it was laughable. It had been perfect, at the moment when he’d realized that he loved her and then he’d let her walk out of his house for what was supposed to be a short trip. And the dream he had for a life with Mercy and his baby had evaporated before his eyes. “I don’t know what turned it all to shit. One second we were happy and the next she was telling me that it wouldn’t work.”
“Something must have happened. These things don’t happen in a vacuum.”
“She went to her house to get Christmas decorations and Dwight tried to break in. And she realized he was only using her for a place to hide out, and she told him to get the fuck out of her life.”
“Which explains why that son of a bitch isn’t in town anymore.” Logan’s mouth tightened for a second, and Alex knew it was because he was about as impressed with Dwight as Alex had been when he’d heard what he’d done. “So how did she make the leap between dear old dad being an asshole to shoving you out the door too?”
Alex thought for a second. In the heat of the moment with her yesterday he hadn’t considered why she was doing it, all he could think of was that he was losing her and he hadn’t exactly been thinking.
“She has it in her head that I’m going to wake up one day and realize that being with her is a mistake. I tried to tell her that it wouldn’t happen, but she won’t believe me. I don’t know how to get through to her that it won’t happen.”
Logan looked thoughtful for a second. “Her old man left when she was three. What about her mother? She still around?”
“No, she died of cancer when Mercy was nineteen.”
Logan winced. “And the last man she was with was just using her to get in and out of Eden Creek without raising suspicion. All that put together is not exactly a recipe for having a rosy outlook for having a lasting relationship. No wonder when Dwight showed her his true colors that she reacted badly to it. When you told her that you loved her, did she believe you and think that it wouldn’t work anyway?”
Alex looked down at the floor. “I didn’t tell her that I loved her.”
He glanced back at Logan and he had a look of disbelief on his face. “Excuse me? You love her, don’t you?”
“Of course I love her. Do you think I want to stay here and talk to you for fun? I’m doing it because the thought of going to my empty home and sleeping in my bed without her is killing me.”
“So the question is, why the fuck are you tell me all this and not her?”
“Have you listened to anything that I told you?” Alex turned to face Logan and crossed his arms over his chest. “She doesn’t think it’s going to work between us. She practically shoved me out her door. There is a wall inside her that I have no idea how to get through.”
“So you’re just going to give up?” Logan’s blue eyes bored into his and Alex growled.
“What am I supposed to do? You seem to be so full of wisdom, what the fuck am I supposed to do when the woman I love is too scared to love me back?” Alex’s shout bounced off the walls of the barroom, and for the first time, he realized what the crux of the problem was. He should have seen it before. It wasn’t that she couldn’t love him, it was that she was scared to. “How am I going to help her get past that fear?”
Logan frowned for a second.
“I know what it’s like to have a parent walk out on you.” If anyone knew what Mercy had gone through, it was Logan since his mother had left when he was twelve. “It leaves a hole, and if someone who’s supposed to love you no matter what can do that, anyone can. Sometimes I still doubt, when I have that feeling that it’s all going to end, that Faith will wake up one day and realize that she doesn’t love me.”
Of all the things that Alex expected Logan to say, this wasn’t it. “Does Faith know this?”
“She does. And because she knows, she tells me every day that she loves me. She shows me that she loves me. And loving her and being with her, raising a family with her has made me a better man than I could have ever been without her. And I think for you, loving Mercy and raising a family with her is what you are meant to do. But she has to know that you love her, and in order for her to know that, you have to tell her.”
“And what happens if I tell her, and she doesn’t believe me?”
“Then you keep telling her. And showing her. She’s afraid, and fear
makes people do a lot of crazy things to keep the fear at bay. Be patient with her, be gentle with her like you would be with a frightened animal and show her that you love her. And it’s not a one and done kind of thing. It’s an every day for the rest of your life kind of thing. So if you aren’t sure that you love her, walk away now.”
There was no doubt in his mind that he loved her, that there would be a hole inside him if she wasn’t a part of his life. He wanted to mate with her, to raise a family with her, and if he needed to tell her and show her every day for the rest of his life that he loved her, it would be his pleasure to do so.
His phone vibrated in his pocket and he pulled it out. To his surprise it was Mercy, and he turned his phone toward Logan so he could see.
“Answer it. And remember what I said. Tell her what’s in your heart and keep telling her until she believes you.”
16
Mercy blinked and her eyes felt sore and gritty. She’d gone upstairs after Rafe had left, curled up on her bed and cried her heart out. After that, she must have fallen asleep because her bedroom was now dark. She closed her eyes again, hoping to go back to sleep but after a few moments, she knew that sleep would not be coming back anytime soon.
She glanced at the clock beside her bed, and the glowing digital numbers told her that it was very close to ten at night.
Great.
Now she was going to be awake for most of the night because of her impromptu nap and there was no way she was going to be able to escape the thoughts that were racing around in her head.
Rafe’s pep talk had done more than upset her. It made her think that maybe she’d made a mistake. That letting Alex go had not been the right decision.
She sat up and put her feet on the floor. If she wasn’t going to go back to sleep, there was no point in laying in here in the dark and thinking. She’d find something to do and hopefully, she would come up with an answer on how to fix the mess she’d made of her life.
She turned on the light in the hall and went down the stairs. A cup of tea would help. She went toward the kitchen and her bare foot hit that damn box of decorations that were still sitting in the hall.
“You’re dealing with that before you do with anything else.” She stooped to pick up the box. Where was she going to put this thing? If she returned it to the closet upstairs she would be reminded of how she’d torpedoed the only good relationship she’d ever had every time she opened the closet door.
She continued down the hall with the box in her arms and went into the kitchen in the direction of the basement. After shifting the box to one arm, she reached out and opened the basement door. She reached with her free hand to flick the light on.
She stood there for several moments. This was the first time she’d been down to the basement since Nathan had broken in, and she couldn’t quite make her feet move forward.
“Do you think the boogie man’s going to come running up the stairs at you?”
She went down the basement steps and took the box of decorations over to where all the other boxes that she didn’t want to deal with sat in the basement. As she set it down, her eyes scanned the other boxes. She should do something with these.
One box caught her eye. Written on the side, in her mother’s handwriting, was the word “memories.” She wanted to turn away from it, to leave the basement and pretend that it and the box of Christmas decorations didn’t exist.
She stared at the box and moved toward it. It seemed to her that her default way of dealing with things was to push things aside, to pretend the issue didn't exist. Or she ran away, which amounted to the same thing.
Now she was at a point in her life where she was in the basement of her house, unable to sleep because she’d pushed away the one truly wonderful thing in her life. Maybe it was time for a reset.
She went to the box, picked it up and moved toward the small wooden patio table that lived on her deck in the summer and here in the basement in the winter. She plunked the box on top of it and picked at the packing tape at the edge until she got enough free to be able to pull it off the box.
Her stomach twisted in knots as she opened the box, but instead of giving in to it and turning away she decided that the feeling was telling her this was important. She needed to face what was in this box.
She pulled the things out one by one, and at first, she couldn’t make any sense of the random collection of things inside. As she looked it over, a lump formed in her throat. On the table was a collection of things her mother had saved that represented every milestone in the life of her daughter. From the tiny scrap of fabric that was from the baby blanket she’d brought Mercy home from the hospital to the tassel from the high school graduation cap that she’d survived long enough to see, all of it was a collection of remembrances her mother had saved.
A tear fell down Mercy’s cheek as she looked at it. She could see plainly and with clarity, that her mother had loved her from the second she’d come into the world until the moment of her last breath.
There was one more thing in the box, a photo album that Mercy had never seen. She pulled it out and on the front was a post-it note where her mother had written “your life.”
She opened it and on the first page was a picture of her from the hospital on the day she was born. There was another picture of her mother holding her in her arms as she sat in a hospital bed and Mercy could see the love in her eyes as she looked at the camera.
Mercy closed her eyes and blew out a slow breath. This was so much harder than she’d expected, and it came to her that although her mother had been gone for years, she’d buried the sense of loss that she’d felt over it with work and a string of failed relationships.
She quickly flipped through the album, hoping that by getting to the end of it she would get some sign, some answer that would tell her where she was supposed to go from here. From the midpoint of the album all the way to the end, the pages were empty. An envelope with her name on it was taped to the first empty page.
She carefully pulled it away from the page and opened it. There was a letter inside along with a photograph of a man she’d never seen before holding a baby. She set the picture aside and pulled out the letter.
Mercy,
I don’t know if you will ever read this, but I hope you do. This album is for you to finish the chronicle of your life story. I want you to fill these pages with pictures of you and of the person who takes hold of your heart and never lets it go. I want you to have what I had with your father. I know you resent him. I know you think he abandoned you but you were so little when he was gone that you didn’t know how much he loved you.
Mercy snorted for a second. She wanted to crumple the note in her hand because her mother could not see what the man she’d mated with was like. She resisted the impulse because this was her mother’s last attempt to talk to her, and she loved and respected her mother enough to finish what were her last words to her.
You remind me so much of him. You may look like me but your personality is all him. You have the same stubborn streak. I’ve enclosed a picture of him holding you. I want you to look at it and tell yourself that it isn’t the picture of a man completely in love.
I want you to find someone who makes you as happy as your father made me. I want you to have children who fill your life with as much joy as you brought to mine. And I want you to fill this album with the rest of your story and I hope that it is a story filled with love.
I love you,
Mom
Mercy set the letter aside and blinked her eyes to clear away the tears. Her mother always knew how to get to the heart of the matter.
She picked up the photograph and looked at it carefully. In the picture was a young man with sand-colored hair holding a dark-haired baby. He was looking down at the baby and Mercy could see what her mother had been trying to tell her. The love on the man’s face for the child he was holding was clear.
But the problem was he looked nothing like the man who’d shown up on her door
step not that long ago. As Mercy looked at his face, she saw a dimple at the corner of his mouth, and she recognized it because she saw it on her own face whenever she smiled. She was looking at her father and in the picture he was looking at her with love.
Which begged the question. Who had the man who’d shown up claiming to be her father really been?
She didn't know the answer to that, but she knew one thing. She’d been running long enough.
She set the photo aside and pulled her phone out of her back pocket. After a second’s hesitation, she put in Alex’s number and held the phone to her ear while she waited for him to answer. It took so long that she was afraid for a second that he wasn’t going to, and that she’d blown it with him.
“Mercy?”
His voice came on over the phone and she almost sagged against the table in her relief.
“I made a mistake. Can you come? We need to have a talk, the one we should have had yesterday.”
“Logan has said he’ll lock up so I’m leaving right now.”
He ended the call, and she tucked her phone back in her pocket as she walked up the basement stairs.
She emerged from the basement and a blast of cold hit her and she shivered. It hadn't been this cold when she'd gone downstairs. Had something happened to the furnace? She paused for a moment, and the only thing she could hear was Mrs. Fowler’s barking dog.
She turned toward the front of the house and walked down the hall toward the front door. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that the door leading to the garage was slightly ajar. Not enough to allow her to see into the garage, but enough to tell her that it was not as she had left it.
Her heart hammered in her ears as she froze in place. There was no way that that door had been open when she’d come down the stairs.
“Hello, Mercy.”
Her heart stuttered to a stop as a shadow loomed behind her. She turned slowly around, but she’d recognized his voice and knew who stood behind her.