by Maria Luis
The fast thump-thump-thump of his heart beating against her left shoulder.
She reached back to slip one hand into his damp hair, and he turned his face to press a kiss to her shoulder.
How could she ever live without him again? The unbidden thought sliced through the pleasure, and Brady must have noticed the sudden disconnect between them because he wrapped a hand around to her front to find her clit.
The stimulation drove her off the precipice, instigating a litany of “oh God, oh God, oh God” to fall from her lips. He pulled out, rolled her onto her back, and pushed back in with a powerful thrust.
Oh God.
Words tripped off his tongue as he met her stroke for stroke, his elbows encased on either side of her head and his breath whispering across her forehead. With one final drive of his hips, he reached his peak—shoulders shuddering and mouth raining kisses on her cheeks, her nose, her chin, her mouth.
When the tremors subsided, he scooted back and left the room. Shaelyn heard the toilet flush, and then his feet padding over the carpet. The mattress creaked under his weight, before he stretched out once again and pulled her flush against him.
The urge to turn over and tell him that she loved him coursed through her. But it was just an urge, and because of that, she stifled the emotion before it could rear its head and ruin everything.
They’d decided on having sex. Just sex. Love had no part in the equation.
And still, as she listened to his breathing even out into slumber, she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ever love her back.
On the heels of that came another, more terrifying thought: what would he say if she ever told him about Carla Ritter?
23
“Do you want some coffee?” Brady asked Shaelyn the following morning. “Sugar?”
She was seated at his kitchen table dressed in the same white T-shirt and cotton shorts he’d stripped off her earlier that night. He glanced at the stove’s digital clock: 4:57 a.m. Early as hell, but after a second round of amazing sex, they’d both decided food was in order. Shaelyn wasn’t due at the boutique until later in the morning; as for himself, it’d probably be in his best interest to get his ass down to Headquarters as soon as possible.
Coffee first.
“Shae? Sugar?” Turning around, he noted that she looked . . . scared. No, not scared. Nervous. Her fingers twined in her crazy curls—curls that had been splayed across his pillow all night.
Forcing casual ease to his movements, he pretended her expression didn’t scare the shit out of him as poured them each a mug of steaming black coffee. He took the seat opposite hers and pushed her mug across the table.
Up close, her nervousness seemed more tangible. His heart squeezed at the thought that she might be gearing up to call it quits. He needed to stick to the plan. Slow and steady always won the race. No matter how much he wanted to throw himself at her feet, he suspected that wouldn’t get him anywhere.
Follow her rules, Taylor.
He lifted the mug to his mouth, feeling marginally better when the caffeine hit his tongue. She hadn’t touched hers at all.
Unsure of whether he even wanted to hear her answer, he asked, “Are you okay?” He steeled himself for the worst, gripping his mug like a veritable shield.
“Why did you invite me over last night?”
“I, uh . . . ” Brady coughed into his balled fist. “I wanted to see you.”
Abandoning her coffee, she crossed her arms over her chest defensively. “That’s all it was? Just you looking for a hook-up session?”
His gut told him that this was a trap. She’d misconstrue anything he said, so that “I’m busy tonight” inadvertently turned into “I’m having a different chick over,” and “Let’s not go to my grandparent’s house tonight” soon equated with “I’m ashamed of you and you aren’t worthy of meeting my family.”
So, Brady chose the option of all men in the entire universe when a woman was on the hunt for castration: he kept his mouth shut.
Wrong move.
Shaelyn flung her hands up in the air with displeasure. “I hate when you do this,” she bit out.
Knowing that his next question might actually lose him his most important asset, Brady cautiously asked, “Do what exactly?”
She waved her arm in his direction. “That,” she muttered with a frustrated huff. “When you get all quiet and pretend that everything is fine.”
“I thought everything was fine.” Do not fall for the trickery. Brady warily tugged his mug close to his chest, and did the same with hers in the chance she decided to lob it at his head. “We had fantastic sex last night. We made plans to grab dinner tonight after work. I’m sorry if I seem a little confused.”
Shaelyn shoved her fingers into her hair. She looked exhausted, which made sense as he’d kept her up most of the night. “I guess I just . . . ”
“What is it, sweetheart?”
Her eyes screwed shut, closing him off to the emotions lurking in her gaze. Hands clasping opposing elbows, her shoulders rounded. Brady had witnessed the same pose in countless domestic abuse victims over the years.
Instinctively his senses went on high alert. Reaching for her hands, he wasn’t surprised when she avoided his touch. “Shaelyn,” he said with urgency, “What’s wrong?”
“I need to tell you something.”
The most damning phrase in human kind, in his opinion. Random thoughts skidded through his brain—had this all been a part of her scheme for revenge? Was she actually seeing someone else, and not just some fake fiancé?
His heart stilled as a new thought slammed into him: what if she was rejecting him because she still thought he’d cheated on her?
Screw taking things slowly. He refused to lose her because of some ridiculous misunderstanding when they’d been kids.
“I didn’t cheat on you,” he said, knowing that his attempt to clear the air might prove to be futile. He couldn’t make her want him. “I’ve always wondered if you thought I had, but I didn’t.”
Her hazel eyes blinked back at him. Briefly, confusion edged out the anxiety. “What are you talking about?”
Too late to turn back now. “When we broke up—I never cheated on you before or after that.”
“Then why did you sneak off at Luke’s graduation party?” Her gaze latched onto his. “I found you alone with that . . . that blond chick.”
Ill-timed humor tugged his lips. “You don’t remember her name, do you?”
Mouth pursing, Shaelyn finally reached for her coffee as though she needed something to hold. At last, she muttered, “It’s been twelve years.”
“If it helps, I don’t remember her name either.”
“But you were the one who nailed her in Luke’s bedroom!”
At her vehement outburst, Brady flinched.
“I didn’t touch her, Shae. She wanted to talk in private about Luke. Seems that she’d been harboring a crush on him for years, but he never gave her the time of day—classic Luke.” Raking his fingers through his hair, Brady recalled how he’d spotted Shaelyn in the mirror’s reflection as he’d sat on the floor and spoke to Luke’s secret admirer. He’d called out Shaelyn’s name, but she’d already fled. “She asked me this random question. I’ll never forget it.”
Shaelyn’s silence encouraged him to continue.
“She wanted to know if I’d ever been in a position where I felt as though my path had been laid out for me.”
“Which you did,” she said flatly, voice faltering, “Me.”
“No.” Brady reached for her hands, tugging until she gave in. “I was never forced to date you. But it made me think, you know? You heard my response to that girl, even though you took it out of context. I thought we’d talked it out. You said you believed me.”
“I tried, but—”
“But then you heard me talk to my grandmother,” he finished, knowing it was true.
Her gaze dropped to their clasped hands. “You told her to stop butting into your l
ife, and to stop picking out your girlfriends.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
Her brittle laugh slayed him. “You were raving on about going to Tulane and being able to live your own dream. How you wouldn’t have to see me. Was I supposed to take it any differently?”
Brady nodded, because what she said was true. He had said all of those things to his grandmother. “You missed something important, sweetheart.” When her gaze flicked up to meet his, he nodded again. “If you’d heard everything, you would have learned that I hated the way my grandmother controlled our relationship. Honest truth? I liked you way before she started harping on about us getting together.”
Brows furrowing in confusion, Shaelyn haltingly whispered, “But I thought that you—”
He cut her off, words forming on his tongue before he even had the chance to review them. “Sometimes it was weird. I’d say that I wanted to take you to the movies and my grandmother ‘suggested’ that we go to some fancy restaurant instead. I’d say that I wanted to take you down to Grand Isle for some camping, and she would pester me into changing the plans for Destin. By the summer before college, she was talking engagement rings and wedding venues. She wanted us together because our families ran in the same circle.” Pausing, he drew her hands up to his lips and kissed her knuckles. “I wanted us together because you fucking fit me to perfection. I was sick and tired of my grandmother having the upper hand in our relationship.”
“Until that day.”
“Yeah, until that day.” His grip tightened, his large hands dwarfing her much smaller ones. “Despite the fact that she inadvertently caused strife between us, talking with that girl from Luke’s party opened my eyes. It was like I could see the future, and the future was me trying to balance my feelings for you with what my grandmother expected out of our relationship. I sort of lost it.”
Awareness dawned in her gaze. “So that’s why you were going on about not having to see me in college.”
“I wanted to show her that she couldn’t control me once I left the house. Financially, maybe, she still kept the purse strings, but in every other way I was my own man.” Brady cupped her face in his palms. “I never once thought that you’d heard it all. Considering how the whole graduation-party-fiasco had gone down only the previous weekend, I shouldn’t have been surprised by what you thought happened.”
So softly, he barely heard her, she whispered, “It destroyed me.”
“Fuck.”
Rounding the table, Brady dropped to his knees. His joints popped on the way down, and he ignored the twinge of pain. He placed his hands on her thighs. The position brought them almost to eye level. “I went to your house the very next day, but your dad told me you’d left.”
“Jacksonville,” she said with a hollow laugh. “It was the cheapest option with seats still available. Booked myself a ticket on the Megabus. Never looked back.”
He knew. For a year or two he’d gleaned every scrap of information about her from his grandparents and her family. He’d cornered their mutual friends for details into her life. All the while, Brady had waited desperately for her to visit home.
She never had.
His calls to her phone went unanswered. His emails bounced back marked as spam. One year slipped into two, and then two into three. By then he’d dropped out of Tulane.
Slowly he’d accepted the fact that she wasn’t coming home. Police academy had been both the best and worst thing to happen to him. The best because he’d finally discovered a new outlet to focus all of his energy; the worst, because he’d simply transferred all of his pent-up emotion from loving the woman in front of him to throwing himself into a new job.
He’d entered the police academy as a heartbroken boy and had graduated as a shell of a man.
A trajectory path he’d continued on until she’d returned.
His grip tightened on her knees. “I’m sorry,” he rasped. “I’m so sorry for everything.”
Her hands settled over his, effusing him with the first bit of warmth he’d experienced since they rolled out of bed earlier.
“Ironically enough,” she said quietly, “I forgave you before you even told me everything just now. I spent years hating you and blaming you for things that you weren’t in any way responsible for.” Her tone turned self-deprecating. “Turns out I spent years on the run, victimizing myself at your expense.”
“Don’t say that,” he said. “I should have exerted more energy on making you listen to me. I would have saved us both a hell of a lot grief.”
He would have done more than that. If they had reconnected, there was a chance Shaelyn would never have worked for Carla.
Which was a perfectly self-centered thought. Brady didn’t deserve the blame for her decisions. She’d been an adult when she accepted Carla’s job offer. At any point in time, she could have walked away. The blame sat squarely on her shoulders.
Even so, her mind skimmed the what-ifs before settling on the what-had-been. Of the latter, she had worked for Carla. If she ever wanted to move forward, she had to own up to it.
She had to tell Brady.
Since she’d woken that morning with his arm tucked around her waist and his leg sandwiched between hers, she’d rehearsed her tell-all speech over and over again. The plan had been to walk him through those years in a very linear fashion. All the better, Shaelyn had decided, to explain how and why working for Carla had first appealed to her.
It was meant to be clear-cut. Dry. As if she were delivering news on the weather, and not how her life had ceased to mean anything.
Shaelyn opened her mouth, prepared to deliver the speech she’d mentally drawn up.
It didn’t happen.
Memories darted through her, images of men leaning forward to place a sweaty hand on her knee. Men whispering that their wives would never have to know, and wouldn’t Shaelyn be a good girl and keep her mouth shut? Women sifting their fingers through Shaelyn’s long, curly hair, until in a moment of desperation, she’d hacked the whole thing off.
“I don’t . . . ” She swallowed, hard, and tugged at the strands of her chin-length hair as the black cloud that had once wrapped her up so tightly returned. “I had this all mapped out this morning. Everything I wanted to tell you.”
“Tell me whatever you want,” Brady said, still parked on his knees on the floor with his hands clutched tightly around hers. “As little as you want, or as much as you can handle.”
Her echoing laugh sounded brittle and frayed around the edges. “I don’t know what I can handle.”
“Probably more than you even realize.”
He was so confident that she could do this, and she wanted to show him that his confidence wasn’t misplaced. But I didn’t expect for this to be so hard. Her gaze slid from his, and she forced herself to just get it over with.
“It all started because I needed a job. Rent was overdue, and my waitressing gigs weren’t cutting it. I saw the ad on Craigslist. It didn’t seem all that bad, and in the beginning I suppose that it wasn’t.”
Brady’s fingers tightened over hers. “I’m not sure what that ‘it’ is, sweetheart.”
“Right.” Her eyelids fell shut, so she didn’t have to see him as she bared every secret and insecurity she harbored. “I picked up a job as a decoy. Couple is fighting; one thinks the other is cheating . . . that’s where I would come in, or one of the other girls. My line of work, if you can call it that, was literally to pretend that I was someone who I wasn’t. My sole responsibility was to tempt the suspected cheater into actually cheating. Did they do it? Sometimes no, but most of the times yes. The whole thing was choreographed and arranged between my boss and the client.”
He sat very still. “So, you actually encouraged these people to have an affair?”
Blood rushed to Shaelyn’s head. “It was part of the staging. I didn’t . . . it wasn’t like I had sex with them. My clothes stayed on, even though they were sometimes revealing. It depended on the situation. Some guys went
for the buttoned-up look, and I—I’m not making any sense.” She yanked her hands from his, and burrowed her face against her palms. Tears prickled the backs of her eyes. “I’m butchering all of this.”
His fingers went to her forehead, peeling her hands away from her face. She blinked at him, surprised to find that he didn’t look disgusted. If anything, avid concern lined his features. “Get it all out, sweetheart,” he whispered, brushing his thumb across the crest of her cheek.
“My mom found out.” Shaelyn bit down on the knuckle of her free hand. Could she admit this? The words were pulsing in her chest, ready to be freed. “It was probably right around the time that I started. It was one of her rare visits, and my dad hadn’t come along. I was in the shower when one of my coworkers sent me a picture from the previous night’s decoy session.”
As Brady listened, Shaelyn realized that he felt like a lifeline, holding her steady. Holding her up. His Destin-blue eyes gave nothing away.
“My mother, as you know, didn’t believe in privacy. She heard my phone go off, and she helped herself to seeing who it was.” Shaelyn laughed, low and harsh. “Imagine her surprise when she realized that the woman dressed in nothing but a short skirt, an unbuttoned shirt, and way too much makeup, was me. I was in the man’s lap, because he was the sort with groping hands and didn’t listen when I told him not to touch my shirt. It was one of the photos my boss sent to the client, you know, to show how far her husband was willing to go.”
Brady’s silence finally broke, and his hand pulled back from her face. “Jesus Christ, Shaelyn. And you just let him fucking put his hands on you?”
“I didn’t have a choice. It was my job. I tried to explain that to my mother, but she couldn’t understand. She called me awful names . . . ” Shaelyn tried to push the memory aside, but God, it had wrecked her to see her mother so disgusted. In one fell swoop, she’d fulfilled every fear that she’d ever had of disappointing her parents. “She didn’t visit after that. When I tried to come home, my mom gave me excuse after excuse until I just stopped trying. I failed them just like they always suspected I would.”