“Yeah, not so much.” LJ started the truck, forcing a chuckle because it was that or break something, and breaking perfectly good things was a rich man’s habit. Even if people snuck an extra look at her from time to time, they didn’t follow her around, waiting for her to slide merchandise into her pockets.
“I think today was worse because I was with a man. That’s top-shelf gossip around here.”
His foot stomped too heavy on the accelerator, but all he said was “Small towns are the same everywhere, huh? It’s just like that where I come from.”
“New Orleans is hardly a small town.”
“New Orleans is a whole heap of small towns piled up together,” he said, happy to change the subject. “Hell, when I was little and stepped out of line, ladies three blocks away would whup my butt and then send me home to tell my mama what I’d done. It wasn’t until I went to school that I realized not everybody in the world knew my name by looking at my face.”
“Yeah, well, they know my face around here, too.” Andra laughed, and it was every bit as sour as his had been. “It happened five years ago, but the trial was big news, so my picture was all over the papers for a long time after I was kidnapped. Nobody looked at me the same afterward. And they never stop fucking staring.” The last word hissed out viciously, and if LJ could have thought straight in that moment, he might have been surprised at her swearing.
But he couldn’t think. Couldn’t drive.
“Kidnapped” meant a hell of a lot more things than “assaulted.”
LJ pulled over. There was a gas station at the side of the road, so he parked next to a pump. He should say something to her, something comforting between two people who had been gawked at by strangers because of things they couldn’t change.
But he failed her. All he could do was mumble “Got to get gas” and hope she didn’t notice he was at three-quarters of a tank when he bailed out of the truck. He crammed the pump nozzle in and gripped the trigger until every finger joint ached. Otherwise he’d punch the truck, and he didn’t want her to see another man letting anger flame into violence.
He couldn’t tell if it was the gas pumping or his own blood thundering through his head, but he couldn’t hear a thing.
Kidnapped. How long had she been trapped in that nightmare before someone came after her?
* * *
• • •
Andra pulled her knees up to her chest, watching LJ through the window. He put away the gas pump, started toward the driver’s-side door, and then doubled back and paced another lap behind the truck. His thick shoulders hunched, every muscle fiber cranked taut. A flicker of movement caught her eye, and she turned to see the gas station clerk watching through the station’s window, her thin arms folded tightly over her uniform shirt.
Andra didn’t blame the girl. Right now, LJ was six feet five inches of simmering energy, and nothing about him looked safe. After a week of cooking lessons, though, she was learning to read him. When he went silent and inwardly drawn, it was because he was too angry to trust himself to speak, but not at her. When she’d first confessed she’d been attacked, he’d gotten very, very quiet. She understood that kind of anger: the sort you could never quite swallow.
It was nice to not be the only one feeling it, for once.
LJ got into the truck. His hands were so careful as they gripped the steering wheel that it was obvious he was capable of breaking it.
Andra rested her chin atop her bent knees, wincing. “You okay?”
His chin twitched sideways in half a head shake that never made it back the other way. His palm tapped the wheel once, twice. She tensed as she waited for the third tap. It never came, and he didn’t turn on the truck.
“Please, just . . . tell me how you got away. How it ended. Otherwise, I’m not real sure I’m ever going to sleep again.”
Andra didn’t talk about the things Gavin had done to her in that room. Not to her family or therapists. Not to anybody but the cops and the courts. But she’d googled LJ’s home neighborhood a few days ago, and the first pictures that had come up were of terrified people clinging to their roofs during Hurricane Katrina, just to stay above the floodwaters. He understood what it meant to be trapped. And she wanted him to know that whatever else Gavin had done to her, he hadn’t won.
“I worked out the screws holding the headboard on. With my fingernails.”
LJ looked over and blinked, his eyes nearly black, and she could tell he didn’t understand.
“When he left the morning after he took me, I was afraid he was never going to let me go—” She broke off, ducking her chin against her knees.
The hopelessness of that realization wasn’t something she cared to remember, even now.
“Anyway, the foot of the bed was tied to the radiator because the first time he left the room, I tried to drag the bed over to the window. And I was cuffed around one post of the headboard. So I worked out the screws on that side and slid the cuffs off.” She flicked her fingers, feeling the strong nails where there’d once been only bloody nubs and that stiff, painful ridge of not-quite-nail underneath that wasn’t thick enough to budge a screw. “It took me four hours.”
Two hundred and forty of the longest minutes of her whole life. Holding her breath, listening for sounds that he’d returned and it was too late to escape. Andra dropped her feet to the floor of the truck and folded her hands in her lap. Her spine sat in an exactly straight line along the back of the seat.
“He’d wedged the door shut from the outside, and I don’t know where he put my clothes—” She broke off. LJ didn’t need to know that part. “I had to go out the window. It was a small one; I almost didn’t fit.”
“Good God,” he said. “If you hadn’t made it—”
“I know. But I thought if one person saw me like that, it’d be over.” Gavin had said even if she told anybody, it would be her word against his and no one would listen. But if she had a witness, he couldn’t drag her back even if he caught her. You couldn’t get undressed wearing handcuffs, so if you were naked, everyone knew you’d been naked when you were cuffed. Anyone who saw her would know the whole story in a glance. Andra’s hands lifted to pull at her hair, and when she realized what she was doing, she dropped them back into her lap. She was in a truck five years later. There was nothing in this moment to be upset about.
“What do you mean?” LJ said, his voice strained as if it was having a hard time making it out of his throat. “Did someone see you, and . . . it wasn’t?”
“Nobody saw me. The street was empty. When I screamed for help, it sounded so weird I kept having to fight the urge to lower my voice.”
That was the part that always came back in her nightmares. The hard jab of gravel under her bare feet. The tiny spots of blood her fingers left on people’s doors, and the way the handcuffs rattled when she lifted her hands to pound on the first house, then the next, and the next.
She would take all of that haunting her dreams if it meant she never had to relive what came before it. Even so, there was a certain feeling that came with the dream, and it got darker with every house she ran to. In the dreams, the street had no end.
“I went to three houses before anyone came out.”
LJ took his hands off the steering wheel and put them in his lap. The first few times he’d come to give her cooking lessons, she couldn’t take her eyes off those hands. They were too big. He could circle her entire arm with his fingers and snap the bone as easily as he cracked the joint of a chicken. And yet, as he listened, those hands trembled more than hers.
“No one answered? What the hell kind of town—what the hell kind of people . . .”
Andra reached over and laid a hand on his arm, his skin blazing hot beneath her palm. She let go almost as soon as she realized what she’d done.
“It was the middle of the day. Everybody was gone at work.” She knew that now, b
ut when she knocked on that first door, she hadn’t been thinking so clearly. It felt like the whole world had emptied out, and no one was left to care what happened to her. “Someone did come,” she hastened to add. “She heard me pounding on her neighbor’s door. She had to lean on a cane, but she dropped it to—” She’d dropped it to wrap her cardigan around Andra’s shoulders.
Andra swallowed. She should have gone back and thanked her. When the woman came to testify in court, Andra couldn’t even look her in the eye.
She cleared her throat, the quiet in the cab crushing her. Her stomach flipped over. She shouldn’t have told him the whole story. She should have stopped with the window, because what could he say after all that? And they had to drive all the way home still, with her story suffocating the air between them.
“The police came, and then my family. I’d been missing for nineteen hours, but Gavin had taken my phone and texted my roommate, so no one even knew I was gone.” She lifted her chin, determined to make him understand the story had a happy ending. “He said no one would believe me, but they did. It was close for a minute, because people saw me staggering around at the party like I was drunk, because of whatever he put in my drink. He said I was just tipsy and said yes but then took it back. But it was hard to explain the cuffs, the way I had to escape out a window. He was convicted and actually got jail time. My lawyer said I was lucky, because that almost never happens in ra—” She swallowed. “But I had a witness. I had evidence. And I went through the hell of testifying so other girls would be safe.”
LJ turned and started digging behind the seat. She scooted forward to give him more room, even though she wasn’t sure what he was doing. After a second, he produced a screwdriver and leaned over to tuck it into the purse at her feet.
He straightened, and his deep-brown eyes met hers. Andra jerked, she was so surprised. People didn’t look at her when she told that story. They looked down, and they shook their heads with pursed lips. They wrote what she said into their reports. But they never looked her in the eye.
“If you ever come to my door,” LJ said, “I’ll answer.”
Six
LJ was getting mighty comfortable in Andra’s ranch-style kitchen. She had a big island that was perfect for chopping and a slick little kitchen faucet that came right off and turned into its own sink sprayer. He’d been worried she might not want to have him around as much, after their trip to the grocery store had taken such a somber turn. But instead she’d gulped down a deep breath and invited him up to make soup.
He couldn’t help but match her courage after that, so he took his own deep breath, shook off his sadness to tease a fresh smile out of her, and just like that they were friends again. Maybe even a little more than they had been before.
Today, the pot on her stove was billowing steam, condensation beading on the kitchen wall. LJ wiped sweat off his forehead and started to unbutton his shirt so it wouldn’t cling to his skin.
Andra smacked him with the dish towel. “Keep your clothes on, Delisle. And don’t think I’m going to burn the crap out of myself on these peaches just so I can ‘learn’ or whatever nonsense you come up with.”
“It’s hot!” he protested, fighting back a smile at Andra’s haughty scowl. Unable to resist, he slid a chair across the kitchen to her. “Sit down if you’re gonna swoon.”
She snorted, picking up a spoon to stir the peaches in the boiling water. “Yankee girls don’t swoon, Casanova. And you’ve got a pretty high opinion of your abs.”
“I better. You have any idea how many sit-ups it takes to get abs like these?” He crowded her out of the way and stole the spoon, his shirt still hanging open as he fished peaches out of the pot and dropped them into the waiting bowl of ice water. “Not too long, now. You want them to blanch, not cook.”
“I’m going to blanch you if you keep hip-checking me out of the way all the time.” Andra planted her hands on her hips. “Whatever happened to a simple ‘excuse me’?”
“Well, excuse me if you were boiling my damned peaches to death.” He didn’t even try to keep the laughter out of his voice. Pretty well his favorite thing in the world was getting Andra to threaten him with violence. Freud would likely have a heyday with that, Jung even more so. He just couldn’t help it. Watching her get all puffed up and indignant and not a whit afraid of him did his soul some kind of good.
They’d never discussed what she’d told him about her kidnapping the other day after their grocery store run. And he’d never asked about all the parts she hadn’t told him.
He’d thought about it, all right. All through that sleepless night of staring at his darkened phone on the nightstand. Answers were only a quick Google search away, but he kept thinking about the news helicopters circling overhead while he and his neighbors were still stuck on his roof, waiting for rescue. People were entitled to privacy in their pain.
And Andra was entitled to people looking at her without seeing the story behind that court trial. Now that he’d seen the shadow of horror in that woman’s face in the grocery store, he saw the echo of it in everyone who looked at Andra, even on her own ranch. Stacia didn’t look away as quickly as Andra’s brother did, but her gaze was even heavier with regret. And Bill . . . now that LJ knew her attack wasn’t a simple mugging, the weight in her dad’s shoulders made a lot more sense. As did the fact that he hadn’t been keen to hire a young, intimidatingly tall man to work close by his beautiful daughter.
“Now pull them out of the water,” LJ said. “Easy does it. If you prepared them right, the skins should just fall right off.”
“If I burn myself, you better believe you’re doing the rest.”
“Quit your crying. Aren’t cowgirls supposed to be tough? The peaches are in ice water, so they’ll be plenty cool enough now.” He gave her ponytail a gentle tug. She tensed, but not much, and she kept right on skinning peaches for their cobbler. Warmth melted through him that had nothing to do with the steam off the stove. Encouraged, he let his hand drift down to rest on her shoulder.
“What are you doing now?” She asked it on a sigh, as if he were a puppy whose antics she tolerated with much complaining and maybe a little bit of affection.
“Using your shoulder to prop up my hand—what does it look like? Trust me, if you had to haul around the weight of these great big arms all day, you’d get tired, too.”
“Think it might be your ego that’s tipping the scale, friend.” Her voice was light, but her eyes strayed from the peaches toward the open front of his shirt.
He just smiled, one thumb idly rubbing her shoulder as he watched her work. He missed hugs, but he didn’t want to push his luck. In the South, every woman for seven states around was a hugger, and most of the men, too. Did Andra miss hugs? He worried that she might.
This Sunday’s meal at the main house hadn’t been any less awkward than the last couple. She’d come late to dinner, left early, and barely said a word in between, even when Stacia and Rachel started snarking at each other and it escalated into settling a bet with a leg-wrestling match in the living room. Stacia’d won a week’s worth of gas for her motorcycle with a neat little leverage trick she wasn’t about to explain to Rachel.
Among her boisterous family, Andra still existed in a bubble of silence no one seemed to know how to cross.
She finished with the peaches and hip-checked him right out of their cozy little moment. LJ laughed. “What’s wrong with a simple ‘excuse me’?”
“I’ll find my manners about the time you put some clothes on.” The comment was offhand, but he smirked when her gaze snagged on his abs for an extra moment. She coughed, reddening, and spun on her bare feet to get a mixing bowl off her open barn-wood shelves.
LJ frowned and glanced away from them. They looked nice enough, but nobody who’d ever fought paint prices and paycheck cycles to keep a house sealed from the weather would think that rain-grayed wood was a natural cho
ice for decorating.
“Tell me what to mix up.” She gestured him toward the cutting board. “I’m tired of doing all the grunt work around here.”
His eyebrows shot up, but he smoothed his face before she could turn around and notice.
“All right.” He stepped up next to her, studying her out of the corner of his eye. She watched his hands too close when he held a knife, so he’d quickly gotten into the habit of delegating all the chopping to her. This time, when he pulled a paring knife out of the butcher block, she only smiled and tipped a sideways look in his direction.
“Did you see that last spin I got out of Socks today?” she asked. “Haunches never budged.”
“I did notice that, actually.” He divided each peach into sections, handling them gently so they wouldn’t bruise. He had to fight back a smile every time the knife moved and her eyes didn’t follow it. “It was a beautiful thing. Absolutely beautiful.”
Seven
Dust hung in the popcorn-scented air, the dirt by the fence malty with spilled beer. By the rodeo grandstands, the women’s going-to-town-day perfume was too thick to breathe. LJ had moved down the rail until he was closer to the bull chutes, where all he had to contend with was the grass-green tang of manure.
He’d been busy all morning, warming up his lariat and other people’s horses, polishing hooves, and spraying ShowSheen on every animal in sight until both trailers full of Lawler horses were shiny enough to star in a shampoo commercial.
Now he was taking a break. Ever since Andra had stepped out of the trailer’s tack room, dressed to perform, he’d felt a little like a drunk man playing sober. He needed a second alone to reassure himself that he knew how to walk the line.
Gone were her ragged jeans and baggy T-shirts with horsey sayings on the front. Instead she wore a shimmering, champagne-hued silk shirt that drifted all soft and flimsy over the curves of her breasts, nipping in at her waist before it gave way to a set of black chaps tailored to the flare of her hips. Golden letters down one leg said, “Miss Rodeo Wild Falls 2008.” But it wasn’t the clothes, or the lipstick making her lush mouth look even more kissable than normal. It wasn’t even the spill of black curls that bounced saucily against the small of her back. It was the way her spine stood tall, her muscles coiled with excitement, not nerves.
Unbreak Me Page 5