by Ivy Spears
I felt my heart drop at the photos. “Is that?”
“Yep,” Josh told me eagerly. “The blood splatter in the car was traced back to the sample the doctors took from your father when he was brought in. Trevor probably got out to check on your father and then got back in his car with some of his blood on his hands when he took off.”
“So, he just… he just left him there after he checked on him?” Tears welled up in my eyes and started to slowly drip down my cheeks. “Why didn’t he call anyone? Maybe if someone had found him sooner…”
“He wouldn’t be in a coma,” Josh filled in the blanks again. “You haven’t even seen the witness statement yet.” He flicked through a few more pages and pulled out a white piece of paper with hand written letters up and down the page. “The kid who was out with Trevor that night confessed to the whole thing, gave the cops all the details they needed.”
I went to reach for the paper but Josh flipped the folder shut quickly as a group of officers passed by us. “You should be glad that he’s off the streets, Trevor’s a really troubled kid, Bella, it’s good he’s locked up. I mean, do you see how those people live? In squalor? You know what they say about people who live with the trash… they act like it.”
I looked at him in disbelief. My father was in a coma, a kid’s life was ruined, and those were the kinds of comments he was making? “You’re an ignorant son of a bitch, you know that?” I turned around and took off in a run toward the truck, desperate to get away from him.
“Don’t forget, you owe me, Bella,” Josh called out after me, smirking. “And you better believe I’ll be making good on that debt, sweetheart. You take care now.”
My only response was the slam of my door and the roar of the engine.
Chapter Twenty
I felt numb as I made my way into the barn a half hour later. I had gotten exactly what I asked for; proof. Proof that Trevor was without a doubt the man who had hit my father and then left him there to die. Yet the sense of relief I was so sure would come hadn’t.
I didn’t feel at ease I felt more anxious and upset than ever.
“Bell?” Asher popped up on the rafter above me, using his muscular arms to spring his body off the rafter and land on his feet effortlessly. “I thought that was you.”
I let him take my hand and pull me against his lips. “Hey,” I whispered when our lips parted a few seconds later. Every time I tasted him was better than the last for me.
“What happened?” he asked right away.
“Nothing,” I tried lying.
Asher forced my face up to look him in the eyes. “Don’t even try it. You want to the police station, didn’t you?” He sighed in frustration when I didn’t answer guiltily. “Did I or did I not forbid you from going down there, Bella?” He shook his head. “You didn’t listen.”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry, I just had to know.”
“And?” He pushed me.
“And I got the closure I needed.”
“And how does it feel?”
“Awful,” I admitted.
“Ah, just like I said it would.” He ran his hands over his face and looked me up and down. “What am I going to do with you, Bella? You aren’t listening to the rules… you’ve been a bad girl.”
Heat rose between my legs, making me feel like I was going to melt.
Asher moved closer to me, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “You know you have to be punished, right Bella?” He moistened his lips lightly. “I can’t have you running all over town doing whatever you want, can I?”
I shook my head, trying to stop my undies from burning off at the thought of what was coming. I wanted Asher so bad, I always wanted him but something told me if I didn’t tell him about my little run in with Josh right away I would regret it later on. Asher seemed to have a way of finding out everything.
I clamped my legs together and took a step back from him. “Before we do… that, I should probably tell you something.” I moved my hands back and forth over one another and sighed. “There was a situation at the police station, Paul Ryan started freaking out and going off on me.”
Worry crossed over Asher’s features. “Are you okay?”
I waved him off. “I’m fine, I’m fine, I just had to get out of there pretty quick and when I was going back to the car… um… Josh was outside.” I chanced a glance up at him.
Anger clouded his normally dreamy eyes. “Did you talk to him?”
I sighed. “He said he had information about my dad.”
“And you believed him?” Asher laughed loudly, starting to pace back and forth across the barn. “So, tell me, Bella, which part of don’t talk to Josh Parker under any circumstances did you not understand?”
“We were talking about my dad, Asher! He had a file!” I told him desperately. “The actual case file on Trevor Ryan and what they had on him, I needed to see it… I needed the closure!”
Asher snapped his head back roughly toward the ceiling. “And you believed him? If Josh Parker is telling you something rest assured that it’s not the entire story.”
“I know what I saw, Asher.”
“You know nothing,” he huffed, taking off toward the wooden door at the front of the barn. “I would have thought you would have figured that out by now.”
“Hey!” I snapped. “Now you wait a minute!” I moved after him, grabbing him by the arm and trying to get him to look at me again. “You don’t get to do that, you don’t get to yell at me and stomp off without telling me what the hell is really going on anymore, Asher, we’re past that now.”
“You talked to someone I specifically asked you not to and now you’re believing his bullshit stories, Bella, just like everyone else in this town. What more is there to say?” He looked past the top of my head at the freshly polished barn walls.
“Hey.” I reached up and ran my hands over his chin before pulling his eyes down to mine. “We said we weren’t keeping anything from each other anymore, remember? That’s why I told you… but you have to help me out a little bit here, Asher. What is it about Josh that gets you so worked up? What happened between the two of you?”
Asher’s chest rose and fell heavily above me and something new crept into his eyes, something more than anger and lust, it was something deeper… could it be sadness? Or was it worry… it made no sense. Asher had nothing to worry about, he was the most powerful man in this town.
“What did he do to you?” I whispered.
Asher moved out of my grasp and moved backward, sitting his body down on a stack of hay. “It’s what he’s still doing.” He ran his hands back and forth over his face.
I waited patiently, trying not to let how anxious I was to know what he meant show. His long legs moved up and down slowly over the hay, making his oversized body look even more awkward than it already did.
Finally, he looked up at me. “After you left town I had kind of a breakdown… not because of you or anything,” he added when he saw the look on my face. “I mean, that sucked, trust me. But it was more than that, football was all I had ever known, it was all anyone ever wanted me to do and suddenly I had all these questions.”
“What kind of questions?” I moved closer to him.
“Like who the hell I really was, Bella. I had been doing what everyone else wanted me to do for so damn long that I wasn’t even sure what it was I wanted anymore.” He shrugged. “So… I just said no.”
“Said no to what?” I asked, confused.
“Everything.” He chuckled. “Literally everything. I said no to anything that anyone would ask me to do until I could figure out what it was I wanted to do and that pissed a lot of people off. People don’t like change, you know?” He stood up from the stack of hay and crossed the barn, peering out one of the windows. “I didn’t go away to college… I just left.”
I felt so stunned, how was it possible I had known none of this? Sure, I had made sure I cut off everyone from here a long time ago but I had always just assumed Asher went
to USC to play football… that had been the plan since he was in 8th grade. It never occurred to me he would stray from it.
I forced myself to talk. “Where… where did you go?”
Asher chuckled softly. “I just traveled. Took everything I’d ever saved for college and took off around the world.” He paused and glanced at me. “Even ended up in Boston.”
I gulped loudly, at a loss for words.
“Anyway,” he continued, “by the time a year was up I came back and I realized that I didn’t want to play football anymore. Hell, I’d never really wanted to play fucking football.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know much, I just knew that something had to change… I had to change if I ever wanted to be something real, you know?”
“I do know,” I told him honestly. This whole time I had convinced myself it was only me who wanted to grow, only me who wanted to change, it had never occurred to me that Asher might be back here doing the same exact thing.
“It sounds corny, I know that. I just needed to be different. So when I got back I did the complete opposite of what everyone expected, I took a job at a contracting assistant. The money was crap and the work was hard… long hours, shitty labor… but the guy I worked for…” He shook his head sadly, lost in his own thoughts.
“What? The guy you worked for was what?” I asked, begging him to continue, I was curious. Too curious, but I couldn’t help it. Asher had this whole life that I knew nothing about and the more he told me the more I craved.
“He cared,” he said sarcastically. “He cared about people. And, suddenly, without even realizing it, I started to care about people too, and that… that was a feeling I hadn’t felt in a while, I didn’t want it to go away. So I threw myself into the job, you know? I really gave it my all and I learned everything and anything he would tell me.”
“So that’s how you know how to do all this stuff?” I asked him, looking around the practically new barn. No wonder he had gotten it done so fast, he’d learned from someone with years of experience.
“Well, yeah, but I learned more than just this stuff from him. I learned anything he was willing to teach me. How to help people without getting the business in trouble, how to trade for fair prices, how to read people… I studied every piece of his craft up until the day he died.” His voice cracked just an inch as he said the last part.
It was probably the closest thing I would ever get from Asher when it came to showing weakness. It might not have been much to some people but I knew how hard it was for him, I knew how much of his self-control he must have had to give up for that small amount of powerlessness.
I could tell just by the small amount he had said about him that he had been Asher’s mentor. Part of the reason that Asher had changed into the person he had always wanted to be.
And while I was grateful for whoever this man was and that Asher had met him, just a tiny part of me was envious too. Envious that I hadn’t been the one to show Asher all of those things; that I hadn’t been the one to make him realize he was worth so much more.
“He died?” I somehow found the courage to ask.
Asher looked up at the rafters. “Heart attack, just like that. One second he was here and the next he was just gone. You can manage my surprise when his lawyer called me a week later and told me Jim Wells had left me everything.”
“Everything?” I tried to keep my mouth from hanging open.
“Well, not everything,” Asher admitted. “He left his family some money, too. But the business and everything tied up in the business along with stocks, property, and shares… he left to me.”
“Wow.” It was all I could manage.
“Wow is right,” Asher said, sitting down again. “I mean we had never even talked about it, you know? He hadn’t even told me he was going to do it and suddenly I was in charge of this huge business, it was a lot.” He shook his head. “But I knew he trusted me with it for a reason and I wasn’t going to fuck it up, no matter what it took.” He glanced at me. “Even if it meant making a few enemies along the way.”
Realization crept into my brain. “Josh?”
“But of course.” Asher looked disgusted at the mere thought of him. “He was Jim’s stepson… but he had never worked under him, barely took any interest in his business, but still… he felt a type of way when I got everything. He thought the business should have been left to him and his mother. He wanted to break it off into pieces and sell it for profit.”
“Oh My God!” I moved closer to him, automatically wanting to be closer to him. “I’m so sorry, Asher, I had no idea that was why you guys didn’t get along! That must have been awful for you!”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle.” He shrugged, his cold and hard exterior plastered back onto his face. “He took me to court though, and it dragged on forever. The judge finally ruled in my favor but Josh has been hanging around town ever since trying to cause trouble for me. He just can’t seem to…”
“Let it go,” I finished.
“Pretty much.” He traced one of his hands up and down my arm. “But now do you get it, Bella? Do you get why I don’t want you to go anywhere near the guy? And why I don’t trust a word that comes out of his mouth?” His dark eyes burned deeply into me. "I didn't know that woman was his exwife when I met her, she came on to me and it just kind of happened..."
Pain shot through my body at the thought.
"And that's why I was so scared of you calling the cops that first night and why you found that gun in my truck... Josh is always there, trying to catch me doing something wrong and the last thing I need is to be caught off guard if he decides to get crazy."
I shook my head slowly up and down. “I’m sorry, Asher, I should have listened to you.” I stood up on my tippy toes and brushed my lips against his slowly.
Asher barely returned my taste before he was putting space between the two of us. “Stay home, Bella, I don’t want you to leave the house.” He took his phone out of his pocket and started scrolling through something on the screen. “Not under any circumstances.”
“Where are you going?” I asked him desperately.
The thought of being away from him wasn’t an appealing one.
“I need to check a few things out.” He looked lost in his thoughts now, already a million miles away from here. He closed the distance between himself and the door in a few easy strides.
“About Trevor?”
He flipped around at the door, hearing the worry in my voice. “If Josh Parker is so determined to prove that he did it, it’s worth looking into because if Josh is interested in something, trust me when I tell you it’s for the wrong reasons.”
I wanted to yell at him, tell him to stay with me, I didn’t want to be alone… actually, I was fine with being alone, I just didn’t want to be away from him. “Be careful,” is what I said out loud, the look on his face told me not to challenge him on this.
Asher kept my gaze for a few more seconds before he softened a fraction and closed the distance between us again, grabbing me by the back of the head and kissing me roughly on the lips.
When he released me a few seconds later I stumbled backward, barely able to regain my composure. His kisses were enough to literally knock me off of my feet.
Asher pulled me toward him again and narrowed his eyes. “I said it once, Bella, and I’ll say it again. Stay away from Josh Parker.” And then he was gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
I tossed and turned for three hours before I was finally able to drift off to sleep. I kept thinking about Asher and worrying about what he was doing. I hoped he was okay, that he hadn’t done anything stupid.
I’d only been asleep about a half hour when something jolted me awake. At first, I was terrified, I thought someone had broken into my room in the middle of the night but after squinting my eyes I realize it was Asher standing across from me.
I exhaled, thank God. “Asher.”
He stood over my bed, shirtless. The only thing covering his body was a pair o
f low jeans that showed off the curves of his six-pack abs perfectly. “You’ve been a bad girl, Bella, a very bad girl.”
I gulped. “I… I have?”
“You have.” He moved closer to me, turning something over in his hands as he looked me up and down. “Take your shirt off, Bella.” He reached down and pulled the blanket off of my body.
I was still half asleep and it took me a second to realize he had a piece of rope in his hands. I let out a small gasp at the sight. Was he going to tie me up? He couldn’t possibly mean… but from the look on his face, he did.
“What are you going to do with that?” I somehow found my words.
Asher grinned into the darkness. “Take your shirt off Bella, now.”
I’ve never seen him like this, so determined and dangerous. The whole thing was so powerful and crazy… and extremely hot. I should have felt like it was weird but all I felt was turned on. The thought of pleasing him was making my legs tremble and pretty soon hotness was spreading up and down my legs.
“Don’t make me ask you again,” he told me sternly.
I removed my shirt slowly, tossing it onto the floor.
“Now your shorts.”
I pushed my shorts down to the bottom of my legs so that I was only in my white panties and purple bra. A burning was consuming my entire body now, the anticipation of what was coming was threatening to destroy me. I closed my eyes and told myself to relax.
Asher groaned at the sight of me and then moved closer, climbing on top of the bed. “Do you understand why this is happening to you, Bella?” He ran his hand up and down my wrist.
“Because… because I didn’t listen.”
“That’s right.” He pulled my wrist up and wrapped it effortlessly into the rope, linking it to the headboard. “And when you don’t listen to me, you have to be punished.” He pulled on the knot making sure it was tight enough before he moved on to my other arm.