by Christa Wick
Her hands found my ass, her nails digging into the flesh to keep me locked tight. I pushed, she tugged, the synchronicity of our movements so perfect that it felt fated, as if nature had fashioned our bodies for one another and no one else.
When we came, we came together, and I knew no one would ever keep us apart again.
13
The universe decided to test my bold claim the very next morning. Halfway through cooking an omelet from the ham, peppers and onion Lacey had cut up, a pounding started at the door. The knocking grew in force, the rhythm erratic and clearly not the product of a rational mind.
I turned the burner off and reached into the kitchen drawer. I pulled out a holstered gun. I had stopped wearing one inside the house, but had placed them in the common rooms and our bedroom, making sure Lacey knew exactly where they were hidden so that she wouldn't accidentally encounter one.
With my pistol secured, I wrapped Lacey's fingers around the handle of the carving knife and told her to stay put. On my way out of the kitchen, I pressed the panic button near the light switch.
I approached the door with caution, perplexed by the absence of shouting. Whoever was on the other side had given up knocking and seemed to be hitting the door in a full body attack. A rather slim body judging by the sound of the impact.
Looking through the keyhole, I saw Amanda Long, a cigarette hanging from her mouth, her garish red lipstick smeared on one corner.
Knowing how thick the door was and how physically unimposing Lacey's mother was, I unsnapped the holster from my belt and returned to the kitchen.
"It's just your mother," I said, capturing her wrist and extracting the knife from her tight grip. "I already signaled for the security team."
"Shouldn't we let her in?" she asked, her brows pinching together, the entirety of her expression suggesting she didn't want to visit with her mother, especially if the woman was acting this crazy.
"Your call," I said with a shrug she couldn't see. "But I don't think there's any harm in letting her wear herself out a bit."
"Whatever she's going to say, I'd rather not have Austin's guards hearing it."
"Good point." I leaned over and gave her cheek a quick kiss before punching the speaker that connected to the gatehouse and telling the team to hold position at the perimeter until I asked for more assistance.
Returning to the door, I opened it suddenly and watched with an admittedly shameful satisfaction as Amanda Long hit the floor in a sprawl.
From the rank breeze as she launched herself past me, I could tell the woman had been drinking.
A lot.
I looked at the drive to find her little red Porsche with a broken headlight. Turning back, I saw that she had regained her feet. I grabbed hold of the neck of her blouse to keep her from charging into the kitchen.
She tried to turn on me, all nails and teeth.
"Don't touch me you filthy pervert! What kind of sick fetish is it to fuck a blind girl?"
Lacey had made her way out of the kitchen, her fingertips lightly trailing against the dining room table as she approached her mother.
"She's drunk, Lace. Best if you keep your distance."
If the woman put so much as a scratch on my girl, I would flatten the bitch.
"Not so drunk I can't see you've turned my daughter into a whore!" Amanda Long twisted to smirk at me. "Or are you the whore? Austin paying you to bang his pathetic little cousin? I bet that's it."
I looked quickly to Lacey and studied her face to make sure Amanda wasn't planting any seed of doubt in her daughter's head.
"Oh," Amanda screeched. "You should see the look on his face."
She jabbed one bony finger in my direction, her arms too short to have any chance of actually poking me.
"Guilty as charged, I see. I knew a man that looked like you could never be interested in that great, big blob of afterbirth!"
Lord help me, I wanted to snap the woman's neck. How someone as sweet and beautiful as my Lacey could come from this drugstore mannequin was one of nature's most terrible mysteries.
Lacey stopped moving toward us. Her face turned to stone and my heart began to sink like one with the thought that she might take her mother's words seriously.
"You're never going to stop being hateful," Lacey whispered. "Are you, mama?"
With my hand still gripping the fabric of her blouse, Amanda whipped her thin frame back in her daughter's direction. "Just like you're never going to be anything other than an ungrateful bitch! I clothed you, fed you, and all you've ever done is embarrass me with your grotesque body and pathetic whining."
"Clothed me?" Lacey asked, fury building in her voice. "Just because I could never see well doesn't mean I couldn't feel the difference between the clothes I had when daddy was still alive and the ones you put me in after he died. You're nothing but a cheap gold digger, mama."
A smile cracked my face. A woman like Amanda could heap shit on her daughter year after year, but eventually the girl was going to blossom and that time had come.
"By the way," Lacey added. "The surgery was a failure and I'm now fully blind. Thank you for checking in ... oh, wait, you didn't."
Amanda stopped struggling. I had the stupid, crazy thought that maybe Lacey's last words had softened the bitch up a little, drawn out whatever maternal feelings might be buried beneath the layers of noxious perfume and Prada clothing, but I was utterly wrong.
"Totally blind, eh?" Amanda asked, her voice coated in acid. "You think Austin's going to take care of you? How's that woman he's marrying going to feel having some helpless, sniveling, overgrown brat always around? Because I sure know how it makes ME feel!"
I jerked Amanda hard in my direction, a growl on my lips and my free hand dangerously closing into a fist. Part of me, what was left of the man my mother had raised, would never hit a woman. But as a soldier, I had killed one. She'd had a bomb strapped to her chest and Amanda didn't, but the woman's words were cutting at Lacey with all the force of shrapnel from a grenade. I could see their effect, Lacey's shoulders starting to sag and the rim of her eyes reddening. She pressed three fingers to her temple, the other hand clutching at the back of a dining room chair.
"As great as Austin and his bride-to-be are," I hissed, yanking Amanda toward the door, "Someone else will be taking care of Lacey—me!"
She tried to claw at my face. I pushed her hard against the wall, my palm pressing against her sternum to pin her in place.
"Your venomous ass is leaving," I warned. "A guard will drive you home and another will drive your car because I'm not letting some drunk bitch kill anyone on the road. But first you're telling me what brought you here today!"
I had my suspicions but I wanted confirmation before I got anyone fired.
"There was a witness to that tramp nurse at the doctor's office giving my whore of a daughter those condoms." The slurring of Amanda's words were half from the alcohol coursing through her veins and half from the tight smirk that stretched her mouth wide and ugly. "You all thought you could shut me out by firing the aide, but I've known every move you've made, known the little bitch was completely blind since the bandages came off!"
"That's all I needed to know." I yanked Amanda outside and handed her off to one of the security team with instructions to take care of her and her vehicle before I went back inside to Lacey.
I found her sitting in the side chair next to the couch, her hands covering her face. I sat on the chair's flat arm rest and gently coaxed her into lowering her arms.
She did, but she pulled her hands back up almost immediately, wincing and shutting her eyes tight.
"Can you draw the curtains," she whispered with an exhausted sigh. "The light hurts."
Without thinking about what she had just said, I got up, lowered the shade and closed the curtains on the big picture window that looked out on the nearby pond.
Halfway back to where Lacey sat, I stopped dead in my tracks.
"Baby, are you saying you can see the light?"
She dropped her hands from her eyes. Surprise slowly crawled along her beautiful face. She rotated her arms and wrists, brought her fingertips together then separated them.
"Oh my god, what just happened?" she asked.
"I don't know, but we're getting you to the doctor right now!”
I swept Lacey up and hustled her to the car, afraid that some blood vessel had popped or some other terrifying complication of the surgery had come to pass. I thought about skipping her specialist and taking her straight to the emergency room, but she insisted that she was fine and that each of the scary complications the doctor had warned her about would be accompanied by intense pain, which she swore she wasn't feeling.
“Do you think?” she asked quietly, more to herself than me.
“Let’s just get you to the doctor, baby.”
14
Seven long hours later, we were sitting in Austin's study in the main house processing everything that the doctor had said.
I’d called Austin from the specialist's office and he’d rushed over, getting there just as the fresh scans the doctor had ordered were brought up from the lab for review.
The doctor couldn't be certain, but he’d suspected that the sudden and extreme jump in Lacey's blood pressure brought on by the scene with Amanda had somehow reduced an undiscovered pinch point on Lacey's optic nerve.
The scan showed a minute change in the density of the cells where the optic nerve joined a sort of neural crossroads that he called the "optic chiasma." Whatever the hell that meant, Lacey's vision was slowly returning. Hour by hour.
Already she could see better than she had before the surgery.
We didn’t have all the answers yet, and we didn’t want to get our hopes up, but the doctor seemed cautiously optimistic. He gave her a heavily tinted pair of glasses and told her to keep her eyes shaded completely for the next twenty-four hours until he saw her again for a follow-up bout of testing.
Lacey of course prodded about best case scenarios and he finally gave in, saying that if everything looked okay the next day, they’d schedule a second visit with the specialist after another week, and then an optometrist for corrective lenses to address any remaining issues with her eyesight. He warned her that her vision would could continue to change periodically for a while, but that the all signs were pointing to those changes being positive ones.
Leaning back in his leather desk chair, Austin exhaled. "At last, something good coming out of Amanda’s toxic presence in your life.”
Lacey frowned for a second, but not over Austin's words.
She pushed up from where we sat on one of two couches and approached Austin's desk. Turning on the banker's light off, she took a step back and lowered her tinted glasses. "This is great grandpa Addison's desk, isn't it?"
A sheepish grin flashed across Austin's face before he erased it with a swipe of his hand. "Yes, your mother was selling it off and I had a friend purchase it without telling her I was the real buyer."
The man they were talking about had died before Lacey was born, so I wasn't sure why she was so interested in his desk given all the other interesting things that had happened that day.
Rounding the desk, she shooed Austin out of the way.
"There's a hidden drawer," she said, smiling as she got on her knees. "Daddy always used to leave me something in it when he had a long trip. I was supposed to wait until the middle of the trip and then open the drawer when everyone else was asleep."
Her voice got weepy remembering her father. I stood and moved to the side of the desk, standing next to Austin and ready to comfort her if she needed it.
The morning and afternoon had been extremely emotional, but she really hadn't stopped to fully process anything after I kicked her mother off the estate.
"Lace, you shouldn't be rooting around down there," I warned, my voice hard, but relenting given how excited she was rummaging under the desk.
"I promise, Wake," she laughed just as I heard a click from whatever latch she had found. "My brain isn't going to explode or anything just because I'm on the floor."
She’d been like that all through the drive to and from the hospital and the exam. Fearless, and just wanting to take everything in.
She'd made me stop several times on the trip back to look at countless things she was truly seeing for the first time. Eventually, I refused to stop anymore because she kept lowering her tinted glasses, ignoring the doctor’s orders to keep them on and take things easy until the follow-up.
She kept rummaging and rooting until suddenly, something landed on the Oriental rug at her feet. A thick letter-sized envelope.
"Oh," she said, her voice sounding disappointed. “You’re already using the secret compartment."
"Uhm, no, Lace. I’ve never seen this envelope before,” Austin answered, picking it up.
He handed her the envelope but she immediately handed it back. "I don't really remember what alphabets look like," she admitted. "I'm going to have to learn to read all over again."
Austin said nothing for a few long seconds as shock spread across his features. Looking up, he flashed the front of the envelope at me.
"Last Will and Testament," I read out loud.
"It's been a long time since I've seen it," Austin said, scratching at his chin with the corner of the envelope. "But I'm pretty sure this is your daddy's handwriting, Lacey."
"What?" Her head came up and I heard the sharp knock of her skull colliding with the heavy wooden desk.
My balls jumped up into my stomach and I dropped to my knees. "Do that again and I'm spanking your ass for real."
Gorgeous blue eyes, alight with mischief and vision, stared at me, their owner wearing the widest grin I had ever seen on her beautiful face.
"You really want my cousin to know you've spanked me?" she giggled before slowly crawling out from under the desk.
Letting my flushed cheeks answer, I snatched Lacey and her shades up and deposited her in the closest chair before gingerly sliding the glasses onto her face. Casting a quick glance at Austin, I asked a question that I hoped would distract him from what I had just said.
"Should we open it?"
He shook his head. "I want to talk to a lawyer before we break the seal. We don't want to do anything that would make it invalid or even harder to prove its validity."
Setting the envelope on the table, he reached into his jacket and pulled out his cell phone. As he searched through his contacts, he kept shaking his head in disbelief.
"I always wondered why your dad didn't draft a new will after Amanda's true nature became apparent. I asked the attorney, but he swore the old man hadn't. Except that Ballinger and your mom seemed to have gotten pretty friendly in the weeks before your father's death and for a few months afterwards—up until what we thought was his existing will was entered into probate."
He paused while the number he had dialed began to ring. He shook his head and returned to his contacts list. "My estate attorney's number is going to voicemail. I'll see if I can reach Gina."
He didn't dial his fiancée immediately. Coming to a stop in front of Lacey, he gave her hand a little pat and grinned more widely at her. "Baby girl, you're about to be rich."
Lacey frowned. "Will the courts even care now that everything was settled?"
Her frowned deepened. "And mama's pretty much spent it all anyway. She mortgaged the house late last year."
Austin disagreed with Lacey's assessment. "There are still dividends from the company. They are a different class from what I hold and I've been stingy on voting dividends for that class given that your mother is the only one who holds those shares. She'd been threatening to sue me, but I kept telling her I wouldn't pay unless she started taking proper care of you."
Like any other sighted twenty-two-year old woman, Lacey rolled her eyes at the suggestion. "Like that was ever going to happen. And doesn't challenging a settled will drag on for years?"
Austin offered an unconvincing shrug, then excused
himself while he dialed Gina. With him halfway across the room whispering an intimate greeting to his lover, I studied my own woman. She stared off into nothing. I wondered what was going through her mind.
Imagining all the thoughts that might be crowding her pretty head was a mistake. She had her sight back, she was about to be rich or at least have enough money to be independent. Yesterday's worry that she would no longer need me had become today's reality.
Watching her face slowly alter as if a light bulb had just turned on in front of her, my heart began to sink. Then her features contorted and a new fear shot through my heart. Was she in pain? Was her vision cutting out?
Please, God, don't let that be taken from her so soon.
Bounding up from the chair, Lacey snatched ahold of my wrist and dragged me toward the patio doors.
Austin asked where we were going.
Lacey didn't answer—I didn't know.
Flinging open the doors, she pulled me onto the patio and then out onto the lawn. We were facing west and I was slow as molasses to realize that the sun was going down.
"Do you know what this is?" she asked in a whisper, her voice wet with tears that were ready to fall.
I couldn't answer, barely managed to shake my head.
Her fingers threaded their way through mine and then she squeezed roughly. "It's our first sunset together, Wake!"
I couldn't look at the disappearing ball of fire. I could only look at Lacey. Awe covered her face. Her free hand crept toward the glasses she wore. I reached across and stopped her before she could take them off. “Don't forget what the doctor said,” I reminded her, as firmly as I could manage.
She blushed then dipped her head and rested it on my shoulder. "Sorry, it's just that I can’t believe I’m actually here with you watching my first sunset ever.”
My heart felt like it was going to explode in my chest. I couldn't believe that I had been doubting our future a few seconds before, thinking that she might be tempted to walk away from it.