Free and Bound (A Club Volare New Orleans Novel)

by Chloe Cox

  Then it started.

  She had let herself forget what this was like. She had driven down here in a total panic because she’d remembered, suddenly, she’d remembered the things she’d let herself forget. And just because Nicole wasn’t broken by it, the way her own mother had been, that didn’t change things, not really. She had let herself forget what her family was really like.

  She had been so, so stupid.

  So when Ford called her, she knew what she had to do.

  “Adra, why are you crying?” he said.

  She could already feel it in his voice. He was worried. She could imagine him pacing around that house, just looking for something to do, for somewhere to put that energy. She knew the only reason he hadn’t insisted on coming with her, let alone tracked her down, was because of how much he respected her, but this would be driving him crazy. Causing him pain. Adra was perversely grateful that he was far away, that it was just his voice tugging at her heart over the phone, because she knew that if she had to see him in person she could never, ever do this.

  “Because of what I’m about to say,” she said.

  There was a pause.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  “He left,” Adra said. “Nicole says he’s coming back, but I don’t… I’d forgotten what this is like, Ford. It’s bad.”

  “Does she have anyone else? How long are you staying?”

  “Her parents are coming. I’m staying as long as she needs me.”

  “I’ll come down.”

  Adra closed her eyes and stifled a sob.

  “No,” she said.

  “Adra,” he said, after a moment. “Don’t.”

  “I’ve been so stupid,” she said. “So, so stupid. You don’t understand. If you knew…”

  “I’m coming down.”

  “No!” she said, suddenly desperate. She really couldn’t do this if she had to see him. She didn’t care if that made her coward so long as it didn’t make her the woman who made promises that she couldn’t keep.

  “You deserve so much more, Ford,” she said quietly.

  “So do you,” he said, and she could tell he was saying it through gritted teeth. There was nothing that annoyed him more than when he thought she disparaged herself. She smiled sadly.

  “Not that,” she said. “I know I deserve more too, but it’s not…it’s not that simple. I’m not capable of this. I’m not. But you are. I can’t do that to you. I can’t risk it.”

  “That is my risk to take,” he said, and it was the first time she heard him sound angry. “Mine. You’re afraid, Adra. I’m not.”

  “Yeah, no shit,” she said.

  “Adra, I love you. I don’t care about anything else.”

  “That’s exactly the problem,” she said. “Don’t love me. Please, don’t love me, don’t be hurt by me, don’t trust me. I’ve been so afraid of being hurt by you, because I love you more than I ever thought I could love someone, but the truth is, I’ve been hurt like that before. I know what it would do to me. But if I ever did this to you…”

  She stopped, and covered her mouth while she sobbed.

  “Adra,” he said.

  “If I ever did this to you, I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t survive this. I can’t be this person. I can’t. I can’t risk it. I’m not as strong as you are, Ford.”

  “You don’t have to be, damn it. I can be strong for the both of us until you’re ready.”

  “I want you to have a family,” she said. “I want you to have all the things that you want… Ford, you know I have complete faith in you, don’t you?”

  He paused.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Thank you for that,” Adra said. “I honestly never thought I’d be able to say that about anyone.”

  “Adra, I know what you’re going to say, and you are wrong.”

  “I’m not wrong,” she said. “I don’t have faith in myself. How can I? I can’t…I can’t do this to you, Ford. Please. I just can’t.”

  There was a silence. An aching, ageless silence where Adra was alone in her misery.

  And then he said, “No.”

  It was the voice. The Dom voice. Even then, even at that miserable moment, it made Adra sit up straighter.

  “This is wrong, Adra,” he said. “You are scared, and that is understandable, but saying you are not capable…”

  He actually sounded angry.

  “You are wrong,” he said again. “And I am losing my patience. I will be damned if I let you think those things about yourself.”

  Adra closed her eyes again, and felt fresh tears glide down her cheeks. She loved him so much that it hurt, and she had to do this one thing right. What was it that she’d learned through this mess with Charlie? She couldn’t fix it.

  “Not even a Dom can fix everything,” she said quietly.

  “This one can,” he said, his voice like iron. “Watch me.”

  “No, you can’t,” Adra said. She took a deep breath. She had to burn this bridge once and for all. She had to go for the jugular. “And you’re not right about everything, either. You can’t be this perfect, Ford. No one is. And I am the worst person in the world to use to fix your life.”

  There was a silence. A long, cold silence. Adra held her breath to keep from crying. She’d just tried to hurt him in order to do the right thing, and the worst part was, it had worked.

  “That’s what you think I’m doing?” he finally said. “Using you to fix my life?”

  She couldn’t even bring herself to say it again. But she couldn’t do this, either.

  When Adra finally spoke, her voice sounded as dead as she felt inside. “You can’t change who I am, and you can’t change who you are,” she said. “You should find someone else, Ford. Because you can’t have me.”

  Twenty-Six

  Adra barely slept. It was one of those nights where it felt like she hadn’t slept at all, just tossed and turned and tried not to think about Ford even while she missed him with a physical ache, until suddenly, too quickly, it was morning. And there was another day.

  She actually didn’t feel any better than she had the night before. Possibly that was not surprising. She was just…dead. A zombie. She was able to get up, go through the motions, but not one part of her felt alive.

  So she was all set to spend the day with Nicole and the boys, just a way to fill the numb hollow where her heart had been, and she didn’t even realize that that might be a way of distracting herself until Nicole’s parents showed up.

  There was a little bit of a chilly shoulder thing going on.

  Adra thought she was imagining it until Nicole’s mother, while helping to put away dishes, stared straight out the window and said, “So do you plan on looking for your brother?”

  They wanted her out of the house, and that’s what made Adra realize that she didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want to face what life would be like now. She didn’t want to leave this cocoon of numbness and have to deal with a broken heart.

  Yeah, maybe she really was running away from her problems.

  And, to continue that grand tradition, she’d gone outside to supervise a game of touch-flag-soccer-football with the boys’ own made-up rules while she tried to figure out what to do and why she was so messed up.

  Luckily, she didn’t have much time for angst before her phone rang.

  She almost didn’t pick up. She knew she couldn’t handle talking to Ford, and…

  It was Roman.

  “Is everything ok?” she said, picking up immediately.

  “Baby,” Roman said.

  “What?”

  “Baby!” he said again.

  “Roman, you sound like an insane per—Oh my God, the baby is coming?”

  “Yes, the baby is coming, right now, this very second, we are en route to the hospital, and I order you back here right this second.”

  “Roman, you can’t order—”

  “Lola wants you here!” Roman barked. “So you will come if
I have to send someone for you.”

  Adra had never heard anything like it. It was kind of charming in a way—the closest Roman would ever come to losing his cool. She almost felt like smiling.

  Almost.

  “Understood, sir,” she said. “I’m on my way.”

  She could hear Roman smile. “I won’t tell Ford you called me ‘sir,’” he said.

  Adra winced, and covered her mouth to keep from crying. It felt like she’d been hit.

  Well, her best friends were having a child, and she’d broken up with the love of her life. She was going to have to go back and deal with real life whether she wanted to or not.

  Ford and Roman were alone in a hospital waiting room, but Ford was the one pacing back and forth. Roman looked mildly agitated, which for him was the rough equivalent of a volcanic eruption. Ford knew in similar circumstances a normal man would have been reduced to insane gibberish; Roman just raised his voice slightly.

  “I have to go, Ford,” he said. “Lola was very specific about what she wanted. Labor is unpredictable, and at any moment she could—”

  “You’re sure Adra said she was on her way?” Ford said again. “You actually spoke to her? You didn’t leave a voicemail?”

  “I spoke to her,” Roman said. “She said she was leaving right away.”

  “That was over seven hours ago.”

  Exasperated, Roman checked his watch and then looked up, startled. “It has been seven hours. It felt like thirty minutes.”

  “You don’t understand,” Ford said. “Seven hours. She was only coming from San Diego. That’s two and a half hours, tops, even if you drive like Adra.”

  Roman paused.

  “You’re worried,” he said.

  “She should be here,” Ford said, and ran his hand through his hair. Never mind that she’d left him. Never mind that she’d hit such a low with her family that she’d lashed out at Ford, trying to push him away. Never mind that she was miserable. For all her bullshit fears about what she was capable of, Adra would never put her loved ones through this, not in a million fucking years.

  ‘Worried’ didn’t cover it.

  “You haven’t spoken to her?” Roman asked.

  Silence.

  Roman nodded, and put his hand on Ford’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But right now I have to go get Lola what she asked for.”

  “No,” Ford said. “I’ll do it. Go be with your wife. Unless she sent you out of the room because you were driving her crazy.”

  “That,” Roman said, “is a distinct possibility.”

  Ford tried to smile. His own life might be a goddamn mess at the moment, and he wouldn’t be right until he knew that Adra was safe, but that didn’t stop him from appreciating his friend’s happiness. There was no way Roman hadn’t already commandeered the entire staff of the hospital in pursuit of whatever whims Lola might have. The man was probably looking for a new project already, when there was nothing to do but wait. And Lola probably just wanted to distract him.

  “You should still stay nearby,” Ford said. “Go back in and try not to act like Napoleon stuck inside on a snow day. I’ll get whatever it is she wants.”

  “You’re a good friend,” Roman said, grinning back. Then his eyes softened. “I think it will be all right, you know. In the end.”

  Ford knew Roman wasn’t talking about his wife or the baby.

  “I’m going to make sure of it,” Ford said, quietly.

  “Good man,” Roman smiled.

  “What did Lola want, anyway?”

  Roman shook his head, clearly baffled, which was a rare occurrence. “She says Declan Donovan baked her cookies and left them for her at Volare.”

  In spite of the way he was feeling, Ford burst out laughing. “What? There’s no way they’d let her eat cookies right now. Even cookies baked by a rock star.”

  “It might be a trick.”

  “Hell, it’s a good one,” Ford said. “I’ll go get the rock star cookies. You go get your wife.”

  He was halfway through the doors when Roman called to him.

  “Ford,” he said. “Adra will be all right.”

  Ford just nodded. If it was up to him, there’d be no question. He knew she loved him, even if she didn’t know how to make that work yet. And he knew he would find a way for her to be happy, no matter what. He knew a lot of things. But he couldn’t think of anything in the world that could keep Adra from being there for the birth of Lola’s kid.

  Seven hours was a long time.

  Ford tried to calm himself during the drive over to Volare. He thought about how Adra was working through what was left of her hang ups. She’d come a long way already, and this blow up, coming right after her brother went nuclear, this was like the last struggling gasps of this great big beast of a fucking hang up that she carried around with her.

  So maybe she just lost track of time.

  He should have gone down there. Screw giving her space; he should have gone down there. He’d let himself get angry, and that was his mistake, and so he’d stopped himself from going down there.

  “Goddammit!” he shouted, and hit his steering wheel.

  No matter what he told himself, in the end, he knew that woman inside and out. And he knew there was nothing on this planet that could keep her from being there for the people she loved. Roman and Lola and their baby qualified in spades, and that meant something was wrong. Ford wasn’t used to uncertainties wracking his brain; he was used to knowing. This was what anxiety was like. This was what Adra felt half the damn time. How did she do it?

  Best-case scenario, what was wrong was that she’d broken her own heart. It fucking killed him.

  Calm the fuck down, buddy. You’re useless all amped up. You’re on a freaking cookie run for your pregnant friend. Get it done, find Adra.

  The drive from the hospital to Volare took twice as long as it should have, and all those extra minutes got eaten up in the last half-mile. Ford was so preoccupied thinking about Adra and where the hell she was that it took him too long to figure out what the traffic was all about.

  Way too damn long.

  He was almost there when he realized it was that stupid broken traffic light. Just like it had been all those weeks ago, on the day Roman had told them about the movie project. Another accident at that damn light.

  He was practically on top of it when that feeling hit him: a sinking pit of dread opening up in his gut. A certainty that somewhere, something in the universe was dead wrong.

  And he was out of the truck and running by the time he saw Adra’s car on the side of the road, blocked off by yellow police tape.

  There was blood on the ground nearby. A lot of blood. Blood on the ground, and paramedics on walkie-talkies, talking about airlifting a woman out.

  And yellow fucking police tape around her car.

  He ran past it.

  He ran until two cops restrained him, and then he just started shouting. They didn’t understand.

  It was Adra’s car.

  Twenty-Seven

  Adra woke up slowly, the kind of wake up where she fought it, except that something was telling her to wake up, damn it.

  That something was her ribs. Her ribs, and her head.

  When she opened her eyes, it hurt. Her head: it hurt. It wasn’t the kind of headache you’d take Tylenol for; it was the kind of headache you’d stay home for. She closed them again, and tried to remember.

  She was confused.

  She remembered that she’d been rushing because of the baby. She remembered Roman, incoherent for the first time since she’d met him, just shouting “Baby!” over the phone. She smiled slightly, and winced.

  They’d had the baby.

  She opened her eyes again, this time slowly, giving herself time to adjust. And she remembered other things. She remembered seeing that accident happen right in front of her at that dumb broken light, and she remembered screaming out loud, in her car, alone, because that van had run through the intersecti
on and a tiny little compact had gotten t-boned, and all she could think about was the people who’d been hurt. She remembered thinking they were all in trouble. She remembered pulling over, her hand grabbing desperately for her phone to call 911, thinking she just had to do something. She remembered getting out of her car.

  So why did her ribs hurt?

  She blinked again, up at the flickering fluorescent lights and the ugly ceiling tiles. She looked to her left, and saw that an intravenous line ran from the bag dangling above her to her own arm.

  Why was she in the hospital?

  And then she looked to her right, and she remembered something else.

  Ford.

  He was sprawled in a visitor’s chair that was too small for him, his casual suit rumpled, his stubble starting to come in. Sleeping, yet so…

  She didn’t know the word for it. He looked like he was fighting some battle, even when he was unconscious. It made her want to curl up beside him and rub his back.

  And then she remembered something else.

  Oh God, Ford.

  She’d ended it. She’d done her best to end it for good, she’d said things…

  She was in a haze of painkillers and pain, but nothing hurt quite like that memory. It was a particular kind of pain, mixed with embarrassment and shame, the kind of thing she felt whenever she knew she was on the wrong side of an argument, even if she couldn’t remember what she’d been upset about in the first place. It meant that even though he was here with her now, at some point she’d get better, and then they’d be over. He’d be gone. That pain stayed with her while she watched him as she fell slowly back into unconsciousness.

  When she woke up again, much more lucid this time, Ford was still there, in the same chair, practically in the same position. All that had changed was his shirt and the length of the stubble on his face. She had never seen him like this, and she was pretty sure nobody else had, either. Ford looking like he’d slept in a waiting room? Absurd.

  He’d slept in the waiting room.

  Wait, no. He’d slept right where he was. How did he do that? Hospitals didn’t let people just do whatever they wanted. How…