Stolen Away (Hearts of Montana)

by Jennie Marts

  A pink tinge colored her cheeks as she offered him a small laugh.

  “I think we’ve already established that the person who made you feel less than beautiful was an asshole.”

  “True.”

  “But I don’t see you as a rose, either.” He turned her to point at a row of flowers growing beside a fallen log. “See those wildflowers growing there. Aren’t they beautiful?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s how I see you, darlin’. Like a wildflower. One that stands tall and grows where it’s planted. Full of color and brightness. Wildflowers can bloom anywhere, on the side of the road, in a field or on a mountain, even next to a cow pie. Because they’re strong and resilient. They use the resources they have available, and they make everything more beautiful just by their presence.”

  She inhaled sharply, and he worried that she might start to cry. “Dang, but your words can sometimes just make me weak in the knees.”

  “Then you better sit down and have you some of Cherry’s fried chicken—best solution for weak knees.” Cash pulled the supplies from the back of his saddle.

  He’d brought a couple of blankets and laid one down among the roots of the tree, set the picnic basket on top of it, then plopped down next to it. He kept the other blanket folded and placed it next to him, patting the top for her to use as a seat.

  Emma settled onto the blanket, exclaiming over the food that Cash pulled out of the basket. “Oh my gosh, that fried chicken smells amazing. It all looks wonderful.”

  Cherry had packed paper plates and disposable utensils, and they set about dishing up the food and pouring lemonade into two plastic cups. As they ate, they chatted easily about their day and the people in the town, and Emma told him a funny thing that had happened at the diner that day.

  He’d heard from Charlie that morning, and he filled Emma in on how she and Sophie were doing in New York. “I guess they saw a play last night, I can’t remember the name. I’m sure they’ll tell you all about it when they get back. And I guess Sophie is in shopping heaven. She wants to go in every store.”

  Emma laughed. “I’m sure she does.” She cleaned up their plates and packed everything but their drinks back into the picnic basket. Patting her stomach, she proclaimed, “I’m so full, I couldn’t eat another bite.”

  “Then we’ll have to save the pie that Cherry packed for later.”

  She groaned. “More pie. I’m gonna gain ten pounds hanging out with you.”

  “Good. Then you’ll have more for me to hold on to.” He made a playful grab for her butt, and she giggled and squirmed away.

  He pushed himself back and leaned against the base of the tree. “Come on over here,” he said, patting the space next to him.

  She scooted across the blanket and settled under the crook of his arm. “Thank you for bringing me.”

  “It was my pleasure. How you feelin’ about the horseback riding? You still scared or are you getting used to it a little?”

  “I’m getting used to it. Granted, we’re only walking, but I found myself calming down and really enjoying the ride.” She toyed with the buttons on his shirt. “I feel like such a chicken about stuff. I hate to admit to you all the things I’m scared of.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t seem to be afraid of anything.”

  He huffed. “You’re wrong about that.”

  She looked up at him, narrowing her eyes as if to judge if he was being serious or not. “Tell me one thing you’re scared of.”

  “You. I’m scared as hell of you.” The words popped out before he could stop them. And now they were out, hanging in the air, and he couldn’t take them back.

  “Me?” she asked softly. “Why on earth would you be afraid of me? I wouldn’t ever hurt you.”

  He pulled her closer and rubbed his hand over her hip. “I know that, darlin’. But I’m afraid I’m going to hurt you. Like down-in-my-bones, gut-deep terrified of it.”

  “Why? Why would you even think that?”

  He stroked his hand over her hair, his thumb brushing her cheek as he tucked a strand of it behind her ear. “I tried to tell you last night. There’s darkness in my past. In me.”

  Looking him straight in the eye, she said, “Tell me. Tell me your darkest part.”

  He shook his head, the shame of it welling in his chest. “I can’t.”

  “Last night, I bared myself to you, showed you my body, let you lay witness to my scars and the evidence of my darkness. I shared that with you.”

  “I know. But I’ve got scars you can’t see.”

  “So do I. That’s okay. It doesn’t matter what you tell me, I’m not going anywhere. I lo—like you.”

  He wanted to believe her. Wanted to believe with all of his heart. “I like you, too, Em. I like you a lot. But my past ain’t pretty. I’m afraid if I tell you—if you know the truth about me—you’re not gonna want to have anything to do with me. And you sure as hell won’t like me anymore.”

  “There is nothing that you could say that would change the way I feel about you.” She laid her head on his chest. “Tell me.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cash took a deep breath. “I don’t know if I can. I’ve never spoken to anyone about it.”

  She picked up his hand and held it in hers. “You can. You can talk to me.”

  He’d been telling her all week how she should be brave and step outside of her comfort zone. Well, this was way the hell out of his zone. But she had shown courage this week. She’d pretended she was brave. He could do the same.

  For her. She was that important. This was that important.

  Clearing his throat, he worked to swallow back his fear. “You know I told you about my dad, my stepdad, and the way he treated my mom and me?”

  She nodded against his chest.

  “Well, it was bad. Real bad. And it went on for a long time. And a thing like that gets inside of you and starts to eat away at you. It makes you question who you are, what kind of person you are that you let that go on, that you don’t try to run, or fight back. That you take it, again and again. And then this kind of hate starts to build inside you. Not the kind where you hate brussels sprouts or the color orange. But a bone-deep pure kind of hate. The kind of hate that then makes you question even your own faith. Like if you have that much hatred inside you, how could you be worthy of any kind of love that God would offer?”

  “I know.” She squeezed his hand. “I know that feeling.”

  “I know you do. But it was different for me, because I’m a man. Or I was supposed to be a man. I was supposed to be strong, and I felt like I was supposed to take care of my mom. And every time I failed at that responsibility, that ball of hate grew inside me. It grew until it was this nasty, steaming, churning, mass of rage, and I carried it around knowing that I was like a time bomb just waiting to go off and waiting for that rage to spew out of me like lava from a volcano.

  “Then one night, it happened. My dad was on a terrible bender, and he came after my mom with a baseball bat. She hadn’t even done anything. We’d just been sittin’ on the couch watching television. We thought he’d gone to bed. Then all of a sudden, he came out of their room, yelling and swinging that bat, breaking stuff and knocking holes in the wall.”

  He could feel Emma tense against him and knew that she’d probably had similar experiences of her husband going off on an unprovoked rage.

  “He took a swing at my mom, just swung that bat at her, and I swear to you that I heard the bone crack in her arm. She scrambled off the sofa, crawlin’ across the floor, that broken arm just danglin’ at her side. I stepped in front of her, but he pushed me out of the way, like I was nothing. But that night, as I fell to the floor, that ball of rage finally broke apart and came gushing out of me like vomit. I can remember tasting the bile in my throat as I decided I wasn’t gonna take it anymore. That night was different. There was something in his eyes—some kind of demon—and I think he wanted to kill her.

 
“So, instead of backing down, I stood up to him. As afraid of that rage as I was, it gave me courage—that, or made me stupid enough to think I had a chance against him. But you see, by this time, I was sixteen years old, and I was stronger than I realized, stronger than he realized, and that nasty old rage gave me a kind of strength that I didn’t know I possessed. So when I got up and stepped in front of my mom again, he took a swing at me, and I caught that bat. I caught it and tore it from his filthy hands.”

  “It sounds to me like you were a hero, like you saved your mom.”

  “Don’t ever call me a hero, Emma. I’m nobody’s hero.”

  “But you stepped in and protected your mom. Even at your own risk. You did save her, right?”

  The memories of that night swirled in his head, the images so vivid, he could almost smell the coppery scent of the blood.

  “Yeah, I saved her. But I didn’t just take the bat from him. If I would have just taken the bat and left it at that, I might have been a hero. But I didn’t. So help me God, I didn’t. I took that bat away and swung at him. I’ll never forget the feeling of that wooden bat connecting with his body.”

  She gasped, then raised her head to look at him. “Did you…did you kill him?” Her eyes narrowed, her gaze penetrated his. “Because I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

  “No, I didn’t kill him. I probably would have if I’d connected with his skull, but my aim wasn’t that good, and I caught him across the shoulder. It was enough to knock him down though. He was stunned—like he couldn’t believe I’d done it—hell, I couldn’t believe I’d done it. Then he came back at me, swinging. Hard.

  “But you see, I had all this rage brewing inside me, and so when he took a swing at me, I dropped the bat and started slugging back. Like a decade of anger and frustration poured out of me, and I couldn’t control the fury in my fists. I hit him in the face and the stomach. I’m pretty sure I broke his nose ’cause there was blood, a lot of blood, but I didn’t care. It was like the blood fueled my rage, and I just kept swinging. Then he was down on the floor and holding up his hands in surrender, and he stopped fighting—just lay down and started crying.

  “My mom was crying, too, and pulling me away from him. He started apologizin’ and telling us how sorry he was, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t listening. Not this time. I told him to leave, that we wanted him out and never wanted to see him again. He couldn’t believe it—he begged my mom to give him another chance, but something changed for her that night, too, and she told him no, she wanted him out.”

  “Did he go? Did he actually leave?”

  “Yeah, he did. I told him I was taking my mom to the emergency room and that he’d better be gone by the time we got back or we’d call the police and press charges against him. And he must have believed me, because by the time we got back from the hospital, he was gone.”

  “And that’s it? I mean that’s an awful story, and I’m sorry you had to go through that, but you stood up for yourself and your mother. Why would that make me think less of you?”

  He took off his hat and set it on the ground next to them then ran a hand through his hair. “Because you’re only hearing the part of the story that you want to hear. You’re missing the part where I lost control and let loose my anger—the part where I was just like him.”

  “You’re nothing like him.”

  “Don’t you see? I acted exactly like him. I used my fists and my anger to beat him, to draw blood, to break his nose, and to drive him out of our house. I’d grown up watching him do it, and it was the only way I’d ever seen an adult man handle his problems. It must have seeped into my consciousness, got into my blood, my instincts, because when my back was against the wall, I came out swinging, thirsting for blood. Just. Like. Him.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t believe it. I’ve seen you—”

  “That’s not the end of the story.”

  “Did he come back?”

  “No, he didn’t. He never came back. But what happened that night stayed with me. It changed me. I knew I had that rage, that beast inside me. And it terrified me. Made me afraid that if I let anyone get too close, they might glimpse the monster that was inside me.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do. Because it happened. Or it came close to happening. Because I did let someone in. I was a senior in high school, one of those angsty bad-boy rebels who acted tough and cool.”

  “But were actually hurting inside.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. But I wasn’t tough enough to withstand the attention of Gillian Carter. She was a cheerleader and the prettiest girl in school.”

  “I remember her.”

  He hated the way Emma’s shoulders shrank in at his comment. “Or she was to a stupid eighteen-year-old kid who thought he was in love with her. But she wasn’t in love with me. Hell, I don’t know if she even liked me or if she was just using me to piss off her dad. It doesn’t matter. The point is that she drew me in like a fish on a hook, spinning my head and my heart around so much that I didn’t know which way was up. And I let her in. She told me I was her first, and I got caught up in the moment—thinking that actually meant something—and I told her how I felt.”

  “It does mean something,” Emma said softly, reminding him that she had confessed the night before that he was only the second man she’d ever been with.

  “Well, it might mean something to some, but not to her. I told her I loved her. That I wanted to marry her after graduation. I was serious about it. I’d even borrowed Zack’s car and taken her to this park by her house for a picnic so I could ask her. ”

  “And what did she say?”

  “Nothing. She just laughed. Then she told me she didn’t want a relationship with someone like me, that she’d only gone out with me because she thought I was cute and her friends had dared her to. She said that she’d heard Cash Walker didn’t have feelings, that I was only interested in one thing, and wouldn’t make things complicated.”

  He looked out over the lake, caught up in the memories. “I’d never felt so foolish—and worthless—in my life. She made me feel like an idiot. And I got mad. So help me, I lost my temper, and that monster inside of me reared its ugly head.”

  “Did you hit her?”

  “No. Hell no. But I might as well have. I wanted to hit something. I was throwing our stuff in the car, and the trunk was open. I grabbed the tire iron and started beating the side of the car. I smashed a big dent in the back end and shattered the taillight. She took off and ran home. I ran after her, but when I got there, she slammed the front door in my face and never talked to me again. Zack took the blame for the damage to the car, told his dad that he’d backed into a tree, but I spent the summer paying him back for what I’d done.”

  “So you destroyed the car, but you didn’t actually hurt her.”

  “Not physically, but you should have seen her face. It was in her eyes and the set of her mouth. She was afraid of me. Hell, I was afraid of myself. I was so mad. And I was ashamed which, looking back, probably fueled that anger. But the point is, she was scared of me. Scared that I would hurt her. And I never wanted another woman to look at me that way again. Ever.

  “Which is why I don’t get involved. Don’t let myself get close to anyone. Close enough that they could break my heart, or cause that deep of an emotion to boil up in me again. It’s easier for me to keep things light, and not let my feelings enter into it. Not let anyone into my heart. Until you.”

  He looked down at her, and his heart swelled with the love and compassion he saw shining in her eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Thank you? What the hell are you thanking me for? For telling you that I’m an emotionally closed-off broken man?”

  “For telling me your story.” She reached up and caressed his cheek. “And we’re all broken. We all have things in our past that form who we are now. I thought I was broken, thought my heart was so torn apart that it wouldn’t ever work again, th
at I wouldn’t ever be able to feel anything real again. And that I’d never be able to care for another man. But meeting you started my heart beating again. And even in the short time I’ve known you, my heart acts like it’s been waiting for you all along.”

  Her words flowed through him, like a salve to his bruised and shaken soul. “I haven’t cared enough about anyone since then to want to take the chance on—to risk letting myself get caught up with—to hazard giving them my heart.”

  “You can take a chance on me.”

  He looked into her eyes, and he believed her. He’d been alone for so long, and she was the first person he’d wanted to try having a relationship with. The first person who made his heart stand up and take notice.

  Hell, it wasn’t just his heart that took notice when she was around. Every part of him responded to the simple nearness of her.

  Looking at her now, her eyes full of care and her lips slightly parted—rose-colored and full—and just waiting to be kissed.

  “I already have.” Leaning down, he took her mouth, captured it in his, kissing her with all the passion and hunger that he felt for her. He’d bared his soul, and she hadn’t gone running.

  In fact, she’d snuggled closer and held out her own heart.

  And he didn’t want to hurt her. Ever.

  If he took her heart, he vowed to protect it, to protect her, to never let her be hurt again.

  A rumble of thunder rolled through the air, and raindrops fell on the blanket at their feet.

  He pulled back, noticing for the first time the dark clouds that had rolled in.

  Montana was known for its thunderstorms that snuck up without warning, swiftly turning the big blue sky dark and ominous. They didn’t always last long, but they could be sudden and fierce.

  “Shit. I should have been paying attention.” He peered out from under the canopy of the tree. Thick gray clouds covered the sky, and he could see the long dark lines of rain casting down from the sky. “I think we’re stuck waiting this one out, darlin’.”