by Maisey Yates
She looked around the room at her family, all of them gazing at her like she had grown a second head. Suddenly she did feel what Levi had described earlier.
This was, in its way, a prison.
This success had grown bigger than she was.
“I’m not a child,” she said. “If I’m old enough to be at the center of all this success, don’t you think I should follow my instincts? If I...burn out because I feel trapped then I won’t be able to do my best work. If I burn out, I won’t be able to give you all those years of labor, Joshua.”
“Nobody wants that,” her mother said. “Nobody expects you to work blindly, Faith. No one wants you to go until you grind yourself into the ground.” She directed those words at Joshua and Isaiah.
“You think it’s a good idea for her to work with an ex-con?” Joshua directed that question at their father.
“I think Faith’s instincts have gotten all of you this far and you shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss them just because it doesn’t make immediate sense to you,” her father responded.
Right. This was why she had confessed in front of her parents. Because, while she wanted to please them, wanted all their sacrifices to feel worth it, she also knew they supported her no matter what. They were so good at that. So good at making her feel like her happiness mattered.
A lot of the pressure she felt was pressure she had put on herself.
But every year when there was stress about the scholarship money coming through for boarding school, every year when the cost of uniforms was an issue, when a school trip came up and her parents had to pay for part of it, and scraped and saved so Faith could have every opportunity... All of those things lived inside her.
She couldn’t forget it.
They had done so much for her. They had set her out on a paved road to the future, rather than a dirt one, and it hadn’t been a simple thing for them.
And she couldn’t discount the ways her brothers had helped her passion for architecture and design become a moneymaking venture, too.
But at the end of the day, she was still owed something that was hers.
She still deserved to be treated like an adult.
It was that simple.
She just wanted them to recognize that she was a grown woman who was responsible for her own time, for her own decisions.
“I took the project,” she said again. “It’s nonnegotiable. He’s going to publicize it whether you do or not, Joshua. Because it’s part of his plan for...reestablishing himself. He’s a businessman, and he was quite a famous one, for good reasons, prior to being wrongfully accused.”
“Faith...” Joshua clearly sounded defeated now, but he seemed to be clinging to a last hope that he could redirect her.
“You don’t know him,” Faith said. “You just decided he was guilty. Which is what the public did to him. What the justice system did to him. And if he’s innocent, then he’s a man who lost everything over snap judgments and bias. You’re in PR, maybe you can work with that when the news stories start coming out—”
“Dinner will be ready soon,” her mother interrupted, her tone gentle but firm. “Why don’t we table talk of business until after?”
They did that as best they could all through the meal, and afterward Faith was recruited to help put away dishes. She would complain, or perhaps grumble about the sexism of it, but her mother had only asked for her, and Faith had a feeling it was because her mother wanted a private word with her.
“How well do you know Levi Tucker?” her mother asked gently, taking a clean plate from the drying rack and stacking it in the cupboard.
“Well enough,” Faith answered, feeling a twist of conviction in her chest as she plunged her hands into the warm dishwater.
“You have very strong feelings about his innocence.”
“There’s nothing about him that seems...bad to me.”
Rough, yes. Wounded, yes. Stabbed through the rib cage because of his own wife, sure. But not bad.
“Be careful,” her mother said gently. “You’ve seen more of the world than I ever will, sweetheart. You’ve done more, achieved more, than I could have ever hoped to. But there are some things you don’t have experience with... And I fear that, to a degree, your advancement in other areas is the reason why. And it makes me worry for you.”
“You don’t have to worry for me.”
“So your interest in him is entirely professional?”
Faith took a dish out of the soapy water and began to scrub it. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
“But I do,” her mother said. “Just like I worry about your brothers sometimes. It’s what parents do.”
“Well, I’m fine,” Faith said.
“It’s okay to make mistakes,” her mother said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just forget about Levi Tucker for a second. It’s okay for you to make mistakes, Faith. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to be everything to everyone. You don’t have to make Isaiah happy. You don’t have to make Joshua happy. You certainly don’t have to make your father and I happy.”
Faith shifted uncomfortably. “It’s not a hardship to care about whether or not my family is happy. You did so much for me...”
“Look at everything you’ve done for us. Just having you as my daughter would have been enough, Faith. It would have always been enough.”
Faith didn’t know why that sat so uncomfortably with her. “I would rather not make mistakes.”
“We would all rather not make them,” her mother said. “But sometimes they’re unavoidable. Sometimes you need to make them in order to grow into the person you were always supposed to be.”
Faith wondered if Levi could be classified as a mistake. She was going into this—whatever it was—knowing exactly what kind of man he was and exactly when and how things were going to end. She wondered if that made her somehow more prepared. If that meant it was a calculated maneuver, rather than a mistake.
“I can see you, figuring out if you’re still perfect.”
Her mother’s words were not spoken with any sort of unkindness, but they played at Faith’s insides all the same. “I don’t think I’m perfect,” Faith mumbled, scrubbing more ferociously at the dish.
“You would like to be.”
She made a sound that landed somewhere between a scoff and a laugh, aiming for cool and collected and achieving neither. “Who doesn’t want to be?”
“I would venture to say your brothers don’t worry very much about being perfect.”
Sure. Because they operated in the background and worried about things like her optics, not their own. Isaiah somehow managed to go through life operating as if everything was a series of numbers and spreadsheets. Joshua treated everything like a PR opportunity. And Devlin... Well, Devlin was the one who had never cared what anyone thought. The one who hadn’t gone into business with the rest of them. The one who had done absolutely everything on his own terms and somehow come out of it with Faith’s best friend as a bonus.
“I like my life,” Faith insisted. “Don’t think that I don’t.”
“I don’t think that,” her mother said. “I just think you put an awful lot of pressure on yourself.”
For the rest of the evening, Faith tried not to ruminate on that too much, but the words kept turning over and over in her head on the drive back to Levi’s. She swung by her house and put together a toiletries bag, throwing in some pajamas and an outfit for the next day. And all the while she kept thinking...
You’re too hard on yourself. You can make mistakes.
And her resistance to those words worried her more than she would like to admit.
Logically, she was completely all right with this thing with Levi being temporary. With it being a mistake, in many ways. But she was co
ncerned that there was something deep inside her that believed it would become something different. That believed it might work out.
Beneath her practicality she was more of a dreamer than she wanted to acknowledge.
But how could she be anything but a dreamer? It was her job. To create things out of thin air. Even though another part of her always had to make those dreams a practical reality. It wasn’t any good to be an architect if you couldn’t figure out how to make your creations stand, make them structurally sound.
She didn’t know how to reconcile those two halves of herself. Not right now. Not in this instance.
Now she had just confused herself. Because sex with Levi was not designing a house. Not even close.
She needed to stop trying to make sense of everything.
Maybe there were some things you couldn’t make sense of.
She was having a just-physical relationship with the man. She nodded her head resolutely as she pulled up to the front of his house and put the car in Park. Then she shut off the engine decisively.
She knew exactly what was happening between them, and she was mature enough to cope with it.
He wasn’t a mistake. He was an experience.
So there. She didn’t need to make mistakes.
Satisfied with that, Faith grabbed her overnight bag, got out of her car and went to Levi’s house.
Ten
Faith had only left his house once in the past two days. On Friday she went to work. But on Friday evening she returned, and stayed the night again. Now it was deep into Saturday, a gloomy, rainy day, and she was loitering around his kitchen wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a smile.
He didn’t mind.
“I’ve got some horses coming later today,” he commented, looking over at her lithe, pale form.
She hauled herself up onto the counter, the T-shirt riding up, nearly exposing that heaven between her thighs. She crossed those long, lovely legs at the ankles, her expression innocent, her hair disheveled from their recent activities.
The woman managed to look angelic and completely wicked all at once, and it did things to him he couldn’t quite explain.
She wasn’t for him. He had to remind himself. Because the things he liked about her... They didn’t say anything good about him.
He had practically been born jaded. His vision of the world had been blackened along with his mother’s eye the first time he had seen his father take his fists to her when he had been... He must’ve been two or three. His earliest memory.
Not a Christmas tree or his mother’s smile. But her bruises. Fists connecting against flesh and bone.
That was his world. The way he had known and understood it from the very start.
He had never been able to see the world with the kind of unspoiled wonder Faith seemed to.
He had introduced her to dirty, carnal things, and had watched her face transform with awe every time he’d made her come. Every time he’d shown her something new, something illicit. She touched his body, his tattoos, his scars, like they were gifts for her to discover and explore.
There was something intoxicating in that.
This woman who saw him as new.
He had never had that experience with a woman before.
His high-school girlfriend had been as jaded and damaged as he was, and they might have experienced sex for the first time together, but there was no real wonder in it. Just oblivion. Just escape. The same way they had used drugs and alcohol to forget what was happening in their homes.
Sex with Faith wasn’t a foggy escape. It was sharp and crisp like crystal, and just as able to cut him open. He had never felt so present, so in his own body, as he was when he was inside her.
He didn’t know what the hell to make of it, but he didn’t have the strength to turn away from it, either.
“Horses?”
“There’s a small stable, and some arenas and pastures on this property. Of course, when I move to the other one...”
“You didn’t tell me you needed a riding facility.”
“I figured that’s pretty standard, isn’t it?”
“It doesn’t have to be. It can be whatever you want it to be.”
“Well, maybe I’ll have you sketch that out for me, too.”
“Can I meet the horses?” She looked bright and happy at the idea.
“Sure,” he said. “You like to ride?”
“I never did as much of it as my brothers. I did a little bit when I was away at school, but I didn’t spend as much time doing the farm-life thing as they did. I know how to ride, obviously. We always had a couple horses. It’s just been a while. That was actually one of my brothers’ priorities when we moved back here.” She blinked. “You know, to get a ranching operation up and running.”
He frowned. “Where do you live?”
She laughed. He realized that although the woman designed houses for a living, they had never discussed her own living situation. “Okay. You know how they say contractors are notorious for never finishing the work in their own houses? Or how mechanics always have jacked-up cars? I am an architect who lives above a coffeehouse.”
“No shit.”
“None at all. It’s too much pressure. Think of designing a place for myself. I haven’t done it. I was living in this great, modern, all-glass space up in Seattle. And I loved it. But I knew that I wasn’t going to stay there, so I didn’t do anything else. When we moved back to Copper Ridge... I didn’t really know what I wanted to do here, either. So I haven’t designed a house. And the vacancy came up above The Grind in town and I figured an old building like that, all redbrick and right there in the center of things, was the perfect place for me to get inspiration. I was right. I love it. It works for me.”
“That’s disappointing. I thought you lived in some architectural marvel. Like something made entirely out of cement shaped like the inside of a conch shell.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?”
“Okay, it’s not that insane. I’ve definitely seen weirder. How did you learn to ride?”
This was skating close to sharing. Close to subjects he didn’t want to go into. He hesitated.
“I got a job on a ranch. I was a kid. Twelve. Thirteen. But it’s what I did until I went away to school. Until I got into manufacturing. Until I made my fortune, I guess. There was an older guy, by the name of Bud. He owned a big ranching spread on the edge of Copper Ridge. He passed on a couple years ago now. He took me on and let me work his land. He was getting old, he was downsizing, but he didn’t have the heart to get rid of everything. So... I got to escape my house and spend my days outdoors. Earn a little money doing it. My grades suffered. But I was damn happy.
“Ranch work will always be that for me. Freedom. It’s one of the things I hated most about being in prison. Being inside. Four walls around you all the time. And... Nothing smells like a ranch does. Like horses. Hay, wood chips. Even horse piss. It’s its own thing. That stuff gets in your blood. Not being around it at all was like sensory deprivation. My assets were liquefied when I went to prison. Not frozen, though, which was convenient for Alicia. Though, in the end less convenient.”
“Of course,” she said testily.
“So, my horses were taken and sold, and the money was put into an account. I was able to get two of them back. They’re coming today.”
“Levi... That’s... I mean... I can’t believe you lost your ranch? Your animals?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. She took... She took everything from you.” Faith blinked. “Do you think she did it on purpose?”
“I think she did,” he said, his voice rough.
“Why? Look, I don’t think that you did anything to her. But I...”
“The life I gave her wasn’t the life she wanted,” he said.
“Well, what life did she think she would be getting?”
“She—she was just like me. Poor and hating every minute of it. I was twenty-one. She was eighteen. She thought I might be on my way to something, and I swore to her I was. I thought she had hearts in her eyes, but they were just dollar signs. I loved her. We forged a path together, I thought. Were working toward a future where we could both look down on everyone who’d ever looked down on us.”
“From a house on a hill?” Faith asked, softly.
“Yeah. From a house on a hill. But Alicia wanted more than that. She wanted to be something other than country, and I was never going to be that. Galas and all that crap. Designer clothes and eating tiny portions of food standing up and pretending to care about what strangers have to say about anything—it wasn’t me. But I thought we were weathering those differences, I really did.”
He shook his head. “When she went missing, it was the worst night of my life. She didn’t take anything with her, not that I could see. I thought for sure something had happened to her. She had her purse, but that was it. It looked like she’d been snatched walking between a grocery store and her car. I lost sleep wondering what was happening to her. Dammit, I was picturing her being tortured. Violated. Terrified. I’ve never been so afraid, so sick to my stomach, in my whole life. We might not have been in the best space right then, but I didn’t want anything to happen to my wife, Faith. Hell, I didn’t even think it was so bad that we would get divorced. I figured we needed to work on some things, but we could get around to it.”
Faith bit her lip. “I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine what you went through.”
“It was awful. And then they came and arrested me. Said they had reason to believe I’d done something to her. And later...that there was evidence I’d killed her and made sure the body wouldn’t be found. The body. My wife was a body at that point. And they were accusing me of being responsible for that.” He shook his head. “And what an ass I was. I grieved for her.”
“Do you—do you think she ever loved you?” Faith asked. “I can’t imagine doing that to someone I hated, much less—”