“Talk to me,” I said. My voice cracked. I was going crazy not knowing exactly what he’d done to her and how I could fix it.
She rubbed the back of her neck, nodding slowly. “I went to Horizons in time to see Kade during visitation hours,” she finally began, her voice surprisingly steady despite the fact that she was staring at the floor instead of looking at me. “Only I never made it inside.”
I wished that spark of fire she’d shown a few minutes ago would come back. She’d been right on the verge of plopping her hands on her hips and delivering me a talking-to like she’d done once before, but then she’d stopped herself. Even though I wasn’t on board with why she was trying to stand up to me, I fucking loved the fact that she put her foot down. She was growing a spine, standing up for herself at least some of the time, and it was sexy as all hell. I could acknowledge that much once I forced myself to step back and separate from the heat of the moment, once I could see her without vision clouded by my anger and fear.
“Why didn’t you make it inside?” I asked.
“Because Lance was there waiting for me.”
A couple of tears filled her eyes but didn’t spill over. I was desperate to brush them away, but I forced my hands to stay where they were so I wouldn’t interrupt her in the telling. It was hard enough for her to get it out at all. No need for me to do anything that might cause her to slam on the brakes again.
She glanced up at me for a moment before returning her gaze to her lap. “Apparently, there had been some cameraman following me yesterday, only I didn’t pay any attention to him. The fact that I’d gone to visit Kade in rehab was all over the local gossip sites. But since we’ve been actively avoiding looking to see what they’ve been saying about us, neither of us realized it. Lance did, though. It seems they want to tell the world that I’m having an affair with Kade, that apparently I’m in love with him regardless of how in love with each other you and I have been acting. Supposedly that’s the reason he overdosed at the wedding and every time since then. That he can’t handle seeing me with you all over the place when he and I are really in love. Don’t ask me why they think I married you if I loved him. Maybe we’re in a love triangle or something else equally ridiculous, but that’s beside the point.”
Now I wished we’d been paying closer attention to everything they’d been reporting about us, monitoring how our efforts were paying off instead of letting others do that for us and report back with suggestions as to what we could do better. I inched closer to her. She kept fidgeting and twisting the ring around her finger, drawing my attention back to the bandages on her burned hand.
Slowly, cautiously, I put an arm around her shoulders. I wasn’t sure if he’d hurt her anywhere other than her upper arms. She leaned into me, though, nestling her head against my shoulder. A wave of warmth flooded me, filling my chest, because she was allowing herself to lean on me. Letting me comfort her. I was in deep, and it was too fucking late to do anything about it. Not only that, but I didn’t want to find my way out.
“Anyway,” she said, sniffling, “they filmed me going in and coming out from Horizons yesterday, and they used that footage to supposedly confirm what had previously only been speculation about my relationship with Kade. They brought up shots of your broken nose and your hands, saying you’d gone into a jealous rage, which had led to the last overdose and Kade being compelled to go to rehab, but apparently I just couldn’t stay away. Lance saw it all over the news. He knows you don’t want him to have anything to do with us now that we’re married, but he thought if he could get me alone, or at least away from you…” Tallie shook her head, pressing her eyes closed. “He guessed what I was doing, that I was just trying to find a way to help Kade because that’s what I do. You’re too soft-hearted, Tallie, he’s always said to me. So he figured I would be going back. He called Horizons and found out when visitation hours were, and he was there waiting for me, determined to put a stop to my visits since, in his opinion, I was causing more harm than good by going there. And maybe he’s right about that. I don’t know.”
As much as I wanted to agree with Lance on that—a thought I wasn’t certain how to process—the reasoning behind our opinions on the matter were complete opposites. He was overly concerned with public perception; I wanted to protect Tallie from the myriad ways Kade could hurt her. And apparently, now I needed to protect her from Lance, too—a danger I’d thought well in the past. He’d been staying out of things since the wedding, keeping a low profile. I’d thought we were done with him.
“He was there waiting for me when I arrived,” she continued, “standing outside the entry and watching for me. I didn’t see him, but he was back in the shadows behind a group of people who were outside smoking. If I’d known he was there, I would have brought my phone in, so I could threaten to call 9-1-1 if he tried to pull something. But I left everything but my keys in the trunk, since they were going to make me turn it all in anyway. I didn’t have anything. The smokers turned and went in, and that was when I saw him. I hesitated, thought about going back, but I didn’t want to allow him to keep me from doing what I’d gone to do. I kept walking. As soon as I approached, he stepped into my way and wouldn’t let me past. He said I needed to stay away from there, away from Kade. He wanted to take me to the courthouse right away and talk to a lawyer about getting an annulment from you, saying he’d made a huge mistake by letting me go through with it. I reminded him that Daddy is a lawyer, and I told him there wasn’t anything he had allowed me to do, and I wasn’t getting an annulment or anything of the sort. Then I tried to move past him.”
“And he grabbed you,” I finished for her.
She nodded, the slight movement of her head causing my shirt to drag against my chest. “I tried to jerk free, but he just dug in harder. Told me he’d made me, and now I’d ruined him. He said he can’t get any other work in the pageant world. No one wanted to hire the guru who’d let his charge get so out of control. He said I owed him.”
The only thing Lance had made her was insecure, always thinking she was somehow not good enough. How the hell would she ever owe that man a fucking thing other than a solid kick to the balls? She shuddered, and I drew her closer to me, holding her snug to my chest as if it could be enough to ward off the memory.
“You don’t owe him anything.” Her parents had paid him for all his work over the course of many years. There was nothing else that needed to happen, as far as I was concerned.
“I know that, but the way he said it…” Tallie backed away and lifted her head so she could look at me. Her eyes had turned a rich gold, sparkling with a sense of fear that I wished I could eradicate. “He’s always been over the top,” she said, “but I think Lance is losing it. I’ve never seen him like this before. He seems desperate.”
And there was no telling what a desperate man might do. Maybe the stress of his new circumstances had kicked off some internal issues. Chemical imbalances were all the same in that regard, whether it was something brought on naturally within the body, like anxiety, or if it was something introduced from external sources, like when Kade overdosed. That was the part that scared me—the unpredictability of it all.
With two fingers, I brushed Tallie’s hair out of her eyes and kissed her forehead, just over the bridge of her nose. She snuggled closer to me, resituating herself in my arms as she’d been before.
“He finally let me go when I threatened to scream,” she said after a minute. “It was the only thing I could think of that might work. I didn’t have a very good chance at being able to fight back, and he could probably outrun me even if I did manage to get away. But maybe if I screamed loudly enough, someone from inside would hear and come to help me. He finally released my arms after I threatened him, and I hurried inside and straight to the restroom to get myself sorted out.”
“And then you came home?”
“No. Then I went in to see Kade. I wasn’t going to let Lance stop me from doing what I’d planned to do.” She said it so plainly,
as though there should never have been any doubt. And maybe there shouldn’t have been. Maybe I hadn’t been giving her enough credit.
“His doctor asked if there was any chance he could see Kaylee at some point,” she said, and every ounce of relief I’d been feeling turned into molten lead in my gut. She must have felt me tense up, because she kept going before I could say a fucking thing. “Not right away. He needs to get further into the program before they think it would be good for him. Or even if he couldn’t see her, maybe he could just talk to her. It wasn’t Kade’s idea. In fact, he told them that there wasn’t any possibility that would happen.”
“Not a snowball’s chance,” I agreed.
“But his doctor and his counselors think it would be really good for him. He needs something to live for.”
“It might be good for him, but what about her?” I countered. “She’s a fucking child. She doesn’t need to have anything to do with him.”
“Not even if giving him a glimmer of hope would be what it takes to turn his life around? He’s her father. If he could possibly—”
“This is exactly what I was afraid of when you said you wanted to keep seeing him. There is no hope. None. He’s never going to turn his life around, and the sooner he just goes ahead and dies—”
“So you did say that to him, then?” she interrupted, separating herself. I felt the loss of her warmth immediately. She sat back, looking at me with hurt eyes. “You told him you wished he was dead.”
Had I said the words out loud to Kade’s face? Maybe. Lord knew I’d thought it often enough, but I didn’t remember it. Then again, everything that had gone down the day we’d taken him to Horizons had blurred together into a twisting knot. “I might have,” I conceded.
“You did.” She blinked a few times, as though trying to clear her vision so she could see if it was the truth.
“I probably did,” I said. “I honestly don’t remember. I said a lot of things that day. So did Kade. It was all in the heat of the moment, just shit that came out of our mouths because things got heated. That doesn’t mean—” I stopped myself before finishing that statement. That doesn’t mean I meant it. The truth was…what? Had I meant it? Did I wish Kade, my only brother, was dead? My throat felt thick with emotion that I’d been doing my best to suppress for years. “I don’t really wish he was dead,” I choked out. “But I won’t deny that sometimes I think it would be easier for the rest of us if he was. Then we could just grieve for what we’d lost instead of losing him over and over again. And I don’t want Kaylee to have to go through that. I want her to have a father who can love her and be there for her whenever she needs him. I don’t want her to have to be the adult in the relationship, and I’m afraid that that’s exactly what she would end up being.”
Tallie looked like she wanted to cry again, but she held it in. Actually, she took it further than that. She pushed those tears back and fixed me with a sassy look. “Do you really think it’s better if she doesn’t know him at all? For her, I mean. You don’t think she should have the chance to know him at all, even if he could get clean?”
That was just the problem. I didn’t believe my brother was capable of getting clean. If he was, it would have happened before now. But Tallie looked so fucking hopeful that I couldn’t take it.
“I suppose we could talk to Kade’s doctors,” I conceded.
She immediately brightened, a smile creeping to her lips that made me want to kiss her.
“I said we could talk to them,” I added. “I didn’t promise anything more than that.”
“I know.” She leaned in and kissed my cheek. “But that’s a step.”
A step in the wrong direction. Had to be. But I nodded. “It is definitely a step.”
She didn’t back away immediately, and I wanted to wrap her up in my arms and forget all about the crap we’d been talking about all night by taking things in a different direction, but there were still things between us we needed to hash out.
No time like the present. “Will you show me your arms?” I asked.
I’d thought that she would draw up the sleeves so I could see the bruises Lance had left on her skin, but apparently Tallie had other ideas.
Keeping her eyes on mine, she reached for the buttons of her blouse and undid them one at a time. She slipped her arms out of the sleeves, letting the shirt drop behind her, revealing her pink satin bra. Her nipples were rock hard and pressing against the fabric, and my dick was in the same condition. In fact, my dick seemed to think I should go grab that box of condoms I’d bought and make use of them right this instant.
It was as if there was an internal argument going on within me, my head fighting it out with my dick to decide what needed to happen next.
But right now, I couldn’t let my cock have that much control over the situation, no matter how much I might want it. I needed to see what Lance had done. Reddish-purple marks lined both of her biceps, looking eerily similar to the marks he’d left on her before. Anger roiled through my veins. I touched her shoulder, gliding my hand down to gently trace the bruises he’d left on her.
She shivered and sucked in a soft breath of air. “Hunter?” she said quietly.
I shot my eyes up to meet hers. There was no more fear in her gaze. Only fire.
She placed her hands behind her back, and a moment later, her bra dropped forward, freeing her breasts. She slipped her arms from the straps and took my hand, drawing it to her. “I need you to touch me,” she whispered, a harsh, pleading sound.
Something told me this time, my dick was going to win the argument.
“WE’RE NOT DONE talking about this,” Hunter said. That didn’t stop him from creating the most amazing pressure on my breast, though, molding my pliable flesh to fit his strong hand.
“I know.” There were still a thousand things we needed to discuss, but I was going to go crazy if I couldn’t feel his hands on me, his skin next to mine, his heat stoking mine higher than it had ever gone before. “We can talk more about it later, but touch me now,” I pleaded. And I prayed he would go along with what I was asking of him, because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to think much longer if he kept doing what I wanted him to.
The next thing I knew, he had a hold of me by the hips and I was straddling him, his hot mouth closed over one of my breasts. He swirled his tongue and suckled, and I felt an electric pull that went all the way to my sex.
“Oh, God,” I moaned, letting my head drop back.
He chuckled, not removing his mouth from me until my thighs shook and my panties were wet as all heck. “Tell me what you want, baby. Just say the word.” He made me believe he would give me anything I asked for, but the only thing I wanted right now, more than him taking me to his bed, was him. All of him. The trauma of my afternoon with Lance, and my visit with Kade, had only reinforced what I’d already begun to realize. I was past the point of no return with Hunter.
I brought my head forward again and pressed my forehead to his. “I want you.” I wanted him in more ways than he was prepared to hear. My heart felt ready to burst, and it had little to do with the way my pulse was hammering through my veins.
He gave me a cocky grin right before his lips landed on mine. He swept his tongue along the seam of my lips, gliding back and forth until I opened on a sigh. I fisted my hand in his hair and drew him deeper, steadying myself with my bandaged hand on his shoulder.
Slowly but with all the confidence in the world, Hunter eased his hands back to slide them over my butt and down my thighs. “You’re shaking,” he murmured against my lips as he broke the kiss, his eyes half-lidded.
He wasn’t exaggerating. I might as well have been in the middle of an earthquake with the surges of adrenaline coursing through me. “Anticipation,” I said.
That made him grin again.
He nibbled along my jaw, making a path to the sensitive spot just behind my ear. “Can I tell you what I want?” he whispered, and I shivered.
“Yes.”
“I w
ant you handcuffed to my bed while I make you come so many times you won’t remember anything but my name, and the only reason you’ll know that is because you’re going to be crying it out so many times it might as well be branded on your lips.”
I ought to be offended. Any sane woman would run for the hills when the man she was falling in love with said something as crazy as that, wouldn’t she? For a moment, time froze. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t do anything but marvel at the fact that, instead of making me want to run as far and as fast as I could, I was on the verge of agreeing to what he’d suggested. In fact, there was something very appealing about the thought. It didn’t make sense. I’d spent my entire life being told what to do, how to do it, when, and for how long, and now that I had a hint of freedom and could make decisions for myself, I wanted to let my husband take what little power I had away from me. No, wanted wasn’t right. I craved it. In fact, I might even need it.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Hunter murmured. He set me back from him, far enough that he could look in my eyes. There was a worried crease between his brows, a serious set to his mouth.
“I’m just confused, is all.”
“You don’t have to agree,” he rushed to say. “We’re married, but that doesn’t mean you have to do something you don’t want to do, you know. I’ll never ask or expect you to do something you don’t want. You can say—”
“Yes,” I cut in, breathing fast and hard. “I can say yes.” Because it finally made sense in my head. All those years when Mama and Lance had controlled every aspect of my life down to the tiniest detail, it had been forced upon me. It hadn’t been my decision. But this? This was entirely up to me, and that made me feel more powerful than I ever had in twenty-one years. For the first time, I could choose what I wanted. Hunter was giving me that freedom.
[Tulsa Thunderbirds 01.0] Bury the Hatchet Page 20