by April Lust
“You wanna hear it anyway?” Mac asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “No, I do not. It’s late and all I wanna do is sleep.”
“Shit,” Kellan snapped. He stormed out of the room and into what had until very recently been his bedroom. The door slammed shut in his wake. A very confused mutt tried to follow, but found his way blocked.
“I’ll go wrangle up Kellan.”
She thought about it for a moment. “I’m going to assume that you have some kinda plan for talking him around?”
“I do.”
It would have been really easy to let her father do it, but it felt wrong. She was the reason Kellan’s life was going down a path he hadn’t planned.
“No,” she finally said. “I’ll do it.”
The door wasn’t locked, but she knocked anyway.
“What?” he called from inside. He did not sound happy.
It was all the invitation she was going to receive. She opened the door and Rocco sprang inside ahead of her. He crashed against Kellan, who didn’t move. His wedding clothes, which had consisted of his normal clothes in a state of cleanliness, had been tossed to the ground. He had changed into a hoodie and darker jeans. At his feet was a bag, half full of his things.
“I’ll be ready to go in a minute.”
“All right.”
She gathered up a couple of things and replaced them in the boxes that she’d barely had a chance to go through. “It won’t take me very long either.”
“You don’t need to grab it all, just what you’ll need for a few days.”
“What do you mean?”
“You won’t be staying at my place for very long.”
“Wow, you sure know how to make a girl feel welcome.”
He snorted, but said nothing else. She could very well feel his anger, but Emma didn’t understand it. Yeah, she understood wanting personal space. Five years in dorm living and two more with roommates while she went for her degree in veterinary medicine had taught her to appreciate some privacy. This went beyond that. What had she done to make him so mad? He was nearly shaking as he piled his stuff into the canvas bag.
The sound of a zipper signaled he was ready. Kellan crossed his arms over his chest and waited. It was not a patient stance. He only moved to help her when she tried to pick up three boxes on her own. He stormed out to her Buick and chucked them unceremoniously into her backseat.
“Hey!” she snapped, following in the wake of his storm. “You can be mad at this situation all you want but don’t you dare take it out on my stuff, mister.”
When he whirled on her, she saw his hazel eyes flash in the darkness. “Then don’t manipulate things so you end up in my bed.”
She felt cold fire burn in her belly. “What?”
“I didn’t stutter, did I? You heard me. I get it, you liked me in high school, and you find yourself in this shit situation, so you are going to use it to your advantage, I get it. But I don’t like it. I didn’t want this marriage, and I sure as hell didn’t want you.”
His words hurt, another woman might have whimpered and cried, but Emma Ketchum was not just any woman. She planted her hands on her hips and took a wide stance. “Maybe you are mistaking me for one of your little biker bunnies again, but I haven’t manipulated anything.”
“Sure.”
That one word was filled with so much hate that she knew he wasn’t really mad at her, she just didn’t know what he was really made about, and she didn’t know him well enough to figure it out. So, like she always did when she felt lost, she fell back on science, and in the realm of science, when you had a question you asked it.
“Okay, what’s wrong?”
“I think I—”
“No, you fed me some anger fueled impassioned bull about you thinking I’m manipulating things. Now, while you thinking I am such an evil mastermind that was so obsessed with you that I stayed away for seven years, just waiting for a random criminal to come attack me in an apartment that wasn’t even in my name, just so my dad would come up with some plan to hitch us together so I could manipulate myself into your house is pretty neat, I didn’t.”
“I never said—”
“Oh no, you didn’t. You implied it with this angsty BS by showing some disrespect to my belongings and snapping at me for reasons that were beyond my control.” She stepped up to him and poked a single finger into his chest. “I’m not flattered by that.”
“I wasn’t trying to flatter you.”
“No, my theory is that you were working from some other platform. You are judging my current actions by someone else’s in your past. That’s fine, it's unfair but that’s human, it’s psychology 101. But you cross the line when you think you can manhandle my stuff. Got it?”
He waited a beat and then said, “Your eyes get all sparkly when you are nerd-angry.”
Her look was several degrees above freezing. “Thanks.”
He held up his hands and sighed. Then leaned against the car. “I’m sorry. I don’t like when people pull fast ones with me, and your dad just pulled a pisser.”
“He did, but he meant well.”
“That doesn’t make it any better.”
“Fair enough.” She leaned against the car next to him. “I’m not great at being anyone’s emotional punching bag, Kellan.”
“I get that. Hell, I like that.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. The anger sagged out of him. “I’ve got a temper.”
“Really?” She kept her voice desert dry.
He had the grace to look abashed. “Yeah, my dad…my dad had a hell of a temper. It was worse when he was drunk.”
Emma knew that, but she’d never heard him talk about it. She kept quiet, and still.
“I got used to looking for a swing, you know? If I got home from school and there were bottles all over, or my mom was doing that little mouse walk she did when she was scared, I knew. Hell, even when that didn’t happen I could tell. There’s just a feeling you get when you are in that kind of situation.”
“It’s called hyper-awareness,” she explained when he got quiet. “A lot of abused children develop it as a way of coping. They pick up on body signals that other people overlook because it keeps them safe.”
He nodded. “Yeah, yeah, that sounds about right. Hyper-awareness. Sounds like a superpower. Like Batman or something.”
She put her head on his shoulder. He didn’t return the gesture, but he didn’t move aware either. That was something. The evening grew colder around them.
“One day, I was fifteen or something. I thought I had gotten big enough to stand up to him, you know? I was so tired of just taking the beatings. I did it on purpose, got him mad. I can’t even remember what I did, but he came crashing into my room, and I stood up. I got this great swing on him. Knocked him back a whole foot.”
“Did you win?”
“No.” He laughed humorlessly. “I did not. He nearly put me in a hospital. My mom, she was a nurse once, did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“She was, she worked with the elderly, loved her job to begin with. But, well, my dad beat that out of her. He beat a lot out of her.” He dragged one hand through his hair, and let the arm hang around her as he continued. “But she comes in when he’s finished knocking me silly, she cleans me up and keeps me whole and I just ask her…I ask he why she’s still with him. And you know what she says to me?”
“What?”
“She tells me he loves her more than anyone. She’s got bruises all over her arms from where he’s shaken her and she tells me he loves her.” He spat to one side, as if the words had left a dirty taste in his mouth.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, me too. And that ain’t even the worst of it.”
“Do you wanna tell me?”
“Probably should.” He looked down and away. “You aren’t going to like it much.”
“Okay.”
“Nearly got married once before. Nice girl, waitress. Her nam
e was Nina. We started living together, even talked about picking out a ring or something. It was cool. Then this one night I get a call, Dad’s dead. I dunno why I was surprised, but I was. I go to the hospital and I am all set to say my goodbyes and there is my mom, crying and sobbing. And I dunno why it set me off. Here I was, finally feeling free and she’s sobbing and scared and sad and acting like the best thing that ever happened to her is gone. I…fuck, I got so mad.”
He was looking at the ground. No, Emma decided, not at it. The ground was just a place for his eyes to rest while his mind wandered down the path of his memory towards whatever was haunting him.
“She starts yelling at me for not being as upset as she was. She grabs my shirt and shakes hard enough to rip the fabric. She starts cursing at me, cussing at me…and then she spit on my face. In all the time I had known her she’d never stood up to my dad that way. That just made me angrier. I slapped her. God, it didn’t even feel like me doing it. I just…I got so mad at her for everything, for everything she’d ever done that made me mad, and I slapped her.”
Her stomach felt cold. She couldn’t deny that it made her feel sick. When she looked over he was shaking. “Nina left me. I couldn’t blame her; I was disgusted with myself. I couldn’t stand up to my dad, but I could hit my mother. It was then that I knew I could never have a woman. I was just as bad as he was.”
“I see,” she whispered.
“So, I’ll take you to my place to keep you safe. But, Emma, I can’t be your husband. I can’t get close to you like that.”
She shook her head and moved so she was standing in front of him, putting herself in the way of his distant gaze. She waited until his eyes focused on her. “You did a shitty thing when you smacked your mother. But you know that, and you didn’t keep doing it.”
He tried to look away, but she put her hand on his cheek. She ran her hand over the stubble there. It had been clean-shaven when they kissed.
“Emma—”
“You didn’t beat her down. She was assaulting you and you responded with enough force to stop her. It’s not the same thing, it’s not the same thing at all.”
He wanted to believe her, she could see it.
“It’s late,” he said. “Let’s get you to my place.” He glanced over at her. “My place is a mess.”
“I once roomed at C-Dorm. I bet you I have seen worse.”
With that she climbed into her car, and he climbed onto his bike. It was easy to follow the lone figure of a man on his bike through the otherwise quiet town of Ashland. She appreciated the time alone in her car. Emma needed to think.
She had met plenty of people who were too hard on themselves. She saw one every time she looked in the mirror, but she was at least aware of those moments when she was just asking too much of her brain or her feelings. Kellan didn’t seem to be aware of it at all.
Yeah, he shouldn’t have done what he did, but she would have thought worse of him if he hadn’t realized it was wrong. If he had stood before her and told her the story about why he had hit his mom, and why it had been the tight course of action, she would have been uncomfortable, maybe even angry, but that was not what had happened.
Chapter 7
It was damn surprising how quick everything fell into a rhythm. From the day they moved all her stuff into his place she had settled into what she had called a guestroom. Kellan didn’t agree. It was just a room. If pushed, he called it a den. It was more of a spare room with a foldout couch, and some boxes he had never unpacked, but she hadn’t complained.
“Freshman year there were six of us stuffed into bunks so close that if I reached out, I’d smack someone in the face. Trust me, it is so much better than that,” she had promised as she hauled her boxes in. “I can make it homey.”
Homey. That word alone had sent cold chills into him. She wasn’t supposed to be making this homey. She was supposed to be closing ranks on her life and keeping her head down so she didn’t make herself a target. Gabriel had made it very clear that he’d love to keep her in his line of sight, and Kellan didn’t much like the look in Michael’s eyes either.
A few days later he’d seen her things all over the room. Her books stacked as neatly as she could without a bookshelf. She’d tacked a bunch of pictures up. Most of them were of people he didn’t know, but a few were of her doing things around a green campus, surrounded by the kinds of people who went to college. There was a set of her on some trip to some exotic place with lots of mountains in the background. His favorite, though, was one of her with her hair tied back, brows all knitted together, trying to feed a kitten with some kind of syringe.
What could he do about it? Basically nothing.
“Hey,” she’d said a few days later, her hand slapping a cabinet shut. “I know my life is in danger, but can I go to the grocery store, or the mall?”
“What for?” He’d taken a long drink of a cold beer. “We got stuff.”
“Well,” she’d said, opening the fridge. Her brows were drawn together, just like the picture. “You might be able to live on frozen dinners and beer, but I do appreciate a good home cooked meal from time to time.”
“I don’t cook.”
“Yes, you do. I saw you cook for my dad, remember?” When her arms crossed over her chest and she fixed him with a level gaze he felt an unexpected thrill. There was some sick part of him that liked the way her cheeks went all pink when she got frustrated, especially when she was wearing pajamas with little ducks on them.
He waved his free hand and flashed her a smile. “Fine, I don’t cook often. Your dad needed good meals, so…you know.”
“Yeah, I do know.” The entire statement had sounded loaded with meaning.
He had raised his brows at her. “Bull. You doctor animals. You don’t cook them.”
She snorted. “I am not getting into the ethical nature of different diets with you. What I will point out is that my mom did leave when I was a kid, and since you stayed with my dad you know his food habits as well as I do. Or lack of them.”
“Point.”
“And I am stuck here for the most part, and stressed. I wanna bake and cook.”
“You bake when you stress?”
“It’s normal enough. There are some doctors who say—”
He held up his hands and shook his head. “I don’t need the science stuff. Just tell me what you need, I’ll make sure someone picks it up.”
“Someone? I can’t go?”
It was Kellan’s turn to narrow his eyes at here. “Is cake mix a good enough reason to get shot?”
She looked disgusted. “Cake mix? Heathen.”
He laughed. “You wanna make a cake from scratch?”
“Cake, lasagna, cheese.”
“You can make your own cheese?”
She’d raised her brow at him. “Let me go to the grocery store, and you’ll find out.”
“No go. Write a list, I’ll see someone gets what’s on it.”
“Not you?”
“I gotta run the auto shop. You want me to pick up milk on the way home like a good hubby, all you gotta do is ask.”
“Cute.” She threw up her hands, her eyes rolling back. “Fine, fine. But it’s gotta be someone who knows what they are doing.”
A day later the fridge had been full of all kinds of things. His beer had been organized to a single shelf on the door. There were three different kinds of flour in the pantry. Kellan hadn’t known that there was more than one kind of flour, or that he had a pantry.
She had also stocked the bathroom with girly frippery. Lotions that seemed to be organized in some order of importance, several soaps, and two shampoos that weren’t his. Who needed two shampoos? He had assumed, as a lady of science, that she understood there was no logic in stock piling this kind of crap.
When he had brought it up she had just blinked at him coolly and said, “Shows what you know.”
He wasn’t particularly great with women on a personal level, but he knew well enough when arguing
was pointless. The girl could cut a person down with words the way other people cut people down with guns.
Still, none of that was as bad as the day she’d walked out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel.
Coming home early was a rare and precious gift, and Kellan wanted to make the most of it. The shop business was covered and business at the clubhouse was in a lull because everyone was battening down the hatches after the show of force from Gabriel’s men. With nothing to do he had decided to head home, have a beer, maybe go for a walk with Rocco. Maybe figure out a way to keep Emma from going crazy while on house arrest.