by Andre, Bella
He’d wanted to buy a flower shop. He’d get every last bit of it.
Still, curiosity had her opening boxes, riffling through the contents before sealing them up and setting them back in their place. An abstract part of her thought it might be neat to find some vintage floral design books, or maybe funky vases from the seventies, when Estelle had opened her shop.
Instead there was just box after box of junk. And she couldn’t quite hold back her smirk, thinking of Gabe sweating as he hauled all of this crap down and out.
Sweating. Shirt off. Muscles rippling.
It just wasn’t fair that a man who had so much power over her emotions had turned from a handsome boy into an absolutely stunning man.
Frowning over that, Ellie reached for one of the last two boxes. They’d been set away from the rest of the pile, almost hidden in a dim corner.
They were ordinary cardboard, covered with a layer of dust thick enough to make Ellie cringe. She blew on it, coughed as the thick motes tried to climb into her throat.
And then her heart stopped, because she saw her own name, scrawled across the top of the box in Estelle’s spidery cursive.
“Probably just the things I left when she kicked me out.” But Ellie’s heart throbbed as she slid her fingers under the cardboard flaps and pried them open.
On the top of the box was a piece of construction paper that looked like it might have been red once upon a time. The meaning of the childish drawing was lost in the scrawls of inexperienced fingers, but the neat penmanship on the back proclaimed “Eleanor, age six”.
Age six. That was before she’d ever come to live with Ellie. Before her mother had decided that a child was just too much trouble.
Ellie studied the page, unease bubbling in her stomach in a way that made her feel ill. She wanted to tell herself that it was a mistake, this drawing being tucked away in Estelle’s things, but she knew, somehow she knew that it wasn’t.
Setting aside the drawing, she lifted out the next item, a bundle of photographs held together with a rubber band so old and brittle that it snapped when Ellie touched it.
School photographs... every one of Ellie. One for every year since she’d come to live with her grandmother.
A stack of report cards. A Christmas ornament made of macaroni and bric-a-brac glued onto a cardboard tree. An entire box full of little memories that Ellie had suppressed, because she’d been sure they hadn’t been noticed or appreciated.
A fist took hold of her heart and began to squeeze. Estelle had kept all of these things, even after she’d kicked Ellie out of the house. Why?
The woman had been disgusted with Ellie’s teenage pregnancy. And Ellie couldn’t entirely blame her for having reached the end of her rope.
Ellie had done her absolute best over the years to prove herself unloveable, so certain, deep down, that it was the truth.
Seeing these things, so carefully tucked away... was it possible that Estelle had cared about her after all? Even if she hadn’t had a clue how to show it.
This challenged everything that Ellie knew about her grandmother. Her head hurt, trying to process it. So she set the box aside and eyed the second one with trepidation.
That first one... well, that was enough of a shock. What on earth would be in here?
The cardboard sliced her thumb as she slid open the flaps. Hissing, she sucked on her thumb as she inhaled deeply and decided to just go for it.
A framed photo lay on top. The glass had yellowed, and the glue holding the sides together disintegrated as Ellie gingerly picked it up. Setting the separated pieces on the floor beside her, she pulled the photo free.
It was a picture of a man, and from hair and clothing styles, she judged that it had been taken some time in the eighties. The man...
She knew who he was immediately, though it had been years since she’d seen him. The reddish gold hair and full beard, the blue eyes...
Her mother had once told her that she’d gotten all of her looks from her father.
Estelle said nothing about the man at all, ever.
For a long moment Ellie just looked at that photo, tracing her fingers over the features that were both familiar and alien. Her heart ached and she quickly set the picture aside.
Another was underneath it. This one featured the same man, his arm slung casually around a pretty, bright eyed blonde that Ellie remembered with perfect clarity—Hannah, Ellie’s mother.
The back was labelled in Estelle’s shaky writing, and it read Joseph and Hannah, 1983. They looked so happy, grinning in that moment frozen in time. And their happiness gave Ellie the sudden urge to throw the frame against the wall and watch it shatter.
These people could have made her life so very different, if only they’d loved her, rather than leaving her to the care of an old woman who hadn’t had any interest in raising another child.
What would her life have been like, growing up in Florence, with two loving parents? Would she have still felt the need to rebel, or would she have been one of those other kinds of girls that she’d watched with envy? Maybe she would have been Eleanor, studious and serious. Or maybe she still would have called herself Ellie, but would have cheered on the sidelines of the high school football team, making eyes at the quarterback—at Gabe.
Would she and Gabe ever have connected, if her childhood had been different? Would their baby ever have been created?
No matter how easy it might have been to say it would have been better that way, Ellie couldn’t wrap her head around that. That tiny, perfect creature had existed, even if he had only ever really been a reality to her.
She couldn’t wish that he had never been conceived. He’d changed her life and besides, what was the point in wishing herself back? She’d tried—for long, grieving years she had tried, every fibre of her being trying to force herself back to just a few days before he had died. And in that reality, she knew what would happen, and she gave birth before the single most defining moment of her life occurred.
But she couldn’t go back, not for her son, and not for these parents who had discarded her like trash. So she set this photo aside, too, and pick up the next.
“What’s this?” This one... this was puzzled her. The photo again showed her father. But styles had changed somewhat... his beard was gone. There were fine lines around those blue eyes that hadn’t been there in the previous shot.
And on his lap was a little girl who couldn’t have been more than about two. Rather than looking at the camera, she was looking up at Ellie’s father with wide, serious grey eyes.
Her hair was the color of cinnamon, glossy and sleek and held back at each side with a small pink barrette. Her sweater was pink too, a sweet little cardigan that looked miles more expensive than anything Ellie had ever worn.
Her heart knocked painfully against her ribcage. Who was this girl, who her father—Ellie’s father—was looking at with such affection? Such love?
Flipping the photo over, Ellie scanned the backside for a notation like the one on the picture of her parents.
There was none. But the next few items in the box told her all she needed to know.
A tiny pair of baby booties, crocheted out of scratchy yarn, the pattern one Ellie recognized—Estelle had made the same little shoes for pretty much every baby in Florence. This tiny pair looked like they’d never been used.
The booties were wrapped in a piece of stiff, official looking paper. And the words on it made Ellie’s world shift so quickly beneath her feet that she was sure Armageddon had come.
Who the hell was Tracy Cunningham?
Who on earth was Alexa Kendrick?
That, at least, she had the answer to, right in her hands. Her father had left her when she was barely older than this other girl in the photo. He had left her... and he had started a new family.
Shaking, Ellie tossed the certificate back into the box. On top of it, she threw the picture of her parents, the broken frame, the baby booties. Rising to her knees, she shoved the bo
x across the attic floor. Its weight left a path in the thick dust, a clear mark that she had been here.
“No. No more.” Shaking her head wildly, Ellie crawled back across the floor to the hatch. Feet first, she lowered herself from the attic to the chair, then to the floor. Leaving the chair where it stood, a punctuation mark in the middle of the kitchen, she headed straight for the bedroom, where she began to toss her meagre belongings into her small bag.
She’d started to soften toward this town, and she should have known better.
Nothing good ever came of her presence in Florence, Arizona.
It was long past time for her to go.
Chapter Seven
It just about killed Gabe to stay away from Ellie.
And though he knew she would never believe it, it was about more than the bombshell that she’d dropped on him. Having her so close, but not being able to reach out to her...
It reminded him all too well of what it had felt like, back when he was seventeen. The clean cut captain of the football team, and the son of the sheriff as well, Gabe had been expected to live up to a certain standard of behaviour—and that standard did not include lusting after Florence’s wild child.
He’d given in eventually, but for the longest time, he was just—fascinated, there was no other word for it—from afar.
He’d known her, or known of her, since she’d first shown up in town. There had been mutterings, conversations at the dinner table about what on earth Estelle was going to do with the daughter of her estranged son.
Later, there had been stories, as his father had related to his mother all of the trouble that Ellie had gotten into, the things that she had done. He’d lived vicariously through those the stories, rebelling by proxy whenever she did something crazy.
So he supposed he’d always been drawn to her, but for years, it had been because she was a symbol. She represented everything he could never have.
The first time he’d noticed her, in the way that a boy notices a girl... he could remember that day with perfect clarity. It had been fall of his senior year. Late September. He’d been at football practice, on the big field behind the ugly brick high school.
The coach had called for a break. Sweaty, pumped full of adrenaline, he’d jogged over to the water cooler. He’d dumped a big bottle of icy cold liquid over his head, then refilled it and chugged.
He’d smelled smoke, the lazy, seductive curl of it. He’d never tried smoking, never even had a puff.
As he’d lowered the plastic rim... there she was, standing ten feet away. The smoke came from her cigarette, which she smoked right out in the open, though it wasn’t allowed on school grounds.
She’d been wearing a snug black tank top that showed amazing cleavage. Her legs had been clad in jeans cut so low that—sweet Jesus—when she moved the strings of her thong peeked out.
Her hair was the deep, inky color that came only in a box of color like the ones his mom bought from the drugstore. And though her eyes were ringed in a lot of black gook, he could see, even from this distance, that they were a shade of grey that reminded him of a stormy sky.
She’d simply stood there, smirking at him and smoking, until Coach had barked at her to go. She’d cast a slow, insolent stare at the teacher, flicked her cigarette butt in his general direction.
And then she’d walked—no she’d sauntered away. And with that swing of her hips, that hint of thong, and that devil may care attitude, Gabe had fallen in love the way that only hormone fueled teenage boys can.
They’d both been surprised when that electric connection between had grown stronger, deeper. They’d been each other’s everything—in retrospect, probably not the healthiest relationship.
But they’d been teenagers—they hadn’t know any other way. It was all or nothing.
Seeing Ellie again after all these years, it made Gabe feel like he was seventeen again. When he was in the same room with her, he was hyperaware of her every move, her every breath. She crept into his thoughts when she wasn’t around, no matter what he did to busy himself.
He wanted her. And not just her body, though he’d certainly noticed and appreciated those new curves of hers.
It was more that... as long as Ellie Kendrick was around, he was going to be drawn to her. And this time, knowing what he did now...
He was afraid that that wanting wasn’t going to disappear once she’d gone. And the damn woman was so stubborn, he didn’t have any hope of making her stay.
“Stood brooding, Gabriel.” Scowling to himself, Gabe shoved aside the paperwork that he’d brought him and that was spread over the entirety of his kitchen table. Standing, he stretched, surveying his surroundings.
The apartment was... crappy. There were no two ways about it. And he definitely could have afforded something better. But he’d never seen the point. It was a short walk to work, and he spent most of his time at the station, or on patrol.
On the rare occasions that he needed to relieve the pressure in his cock, he went to the woman’s home. He’d never had any desire to bring one here.
Rolling his neck from side to side, Gabe looked out the window, judged by the setting sun that it was late evening. Past time for dinner.
He didn’t have much appetite. For a man who stood six two in his socks, that was downright strange.
Thinking that maybe a beer would whet his hunger, he cracked open the door to the fridge.
He almost didn’t register the knock on his door, simply because he’d never heard it. No one had ever come to see him here, not even Ed.
Though he tried to steel himself, to hang on to the anger that he’d been stewing in for the last week—damn stubborn woman hadn’t changed a whit—he still felt the clutch of anticipation in his belly.
It was Ellie.
He could feel that attraction between them, pulling at him from the other side of the door, like they were opposite ends of a magnet, drawn together. Distance might lessen the pull, but it never completely went away.
“Can I come in?” Ellie didn’t look at him; instead she kept her eyes on the floor. Her entire body was in a posture of defeat.
“What’s wrong?” He reached for her, instinct even after all these years, then snapped his hands back.
Lifting her head, she studied the movement wordlessly. He waited for the sarcasm, the attitude.
It didn’t come. So he bit his tongue, stopped himself from cynically asking what had changed, and instead stepped back, inviting her in.
She stood in the front entryway, arms hugged to her chest. Unsure, Gabe rocked back on his heels, waiting as she looked around his tiny apartment, curiosity evident on her face.
“Would you like... well, I don’t have any wine. But I have beer. Water, orange juice.” Grateful for something to do, he moved to the galley style kitchen, opened the fridge door. “Go ahead and sit.”
When he turned around, a fresh can in his hands, he found Ellie standing by his small table, his open beer in her hands, a bemused expression on her face. He remembered belatedly that it was the brand she’d preferred when she was far too young to have been drinking anything at all.
“Here.” He held out the fresh one. Eyeing him over the can, she shrugged and sipped from the beer she already held.
“I don’t suppose it really matters at this point, does it?” Smiling wryly, she lifted his drink to her lips for a sip.
Gabe was floored. It was stupid, he knew it was stupid, but the unexpected intimacy—her lips touching the same place his had...
Despite the tension in the air that was so thick he could have scooped it up in a spoon, it heated his blood.
Heated it enough that he had half decided to just go ahead and kiss her—what could he lose, after all?
But she spoke first, clutching the metal can so tightly in her hands that her knuckles went white.
“I haven’t been fair to you.” She spoke slowly, haltingly, but she had Gabe’s full attention. This was the closest he’d ever heard to an apolo
gy, coming from the mouth of Ellie Kendrick.
“I didn’t mean to tell you at all, you know.” As if suddenly weary, she sat, bent until her elbows rested on her knees. Looked up at him through a fringe of long, rosy gold bangs.
“I didn’t see what good it could possibly do. Then once I let it slip, I thought that I shouldn’t tell you anymore. Partly because knowing more could only hurt you more. And partly because...” Her voice trailed off, and she reached for the can of beer, drank deeply.
“Partly because... it’s been mine alone for so long. I’m possessive. I got through it alone. So why should I share it with you?”
“Ellie.” Temper flaring, he wanted to curse. But Ellie had never been an easy woman, and she was just telling him the honest truth.
She held up her hand, stopping him from saying anything else.
“But I just realized... just today realized... it’s not fair to tell you just part of it. Just enough that you can wonder over it, and lose sleep over it, and, God knows, make up all kinds of ideas that may or may not be true.” There was an edge to her voice, a ripple of unease in it that made Gabe wonder what had happened to make the mule headed woman he knew change her mind.
But he was on the brink of discovering what he so desperately needed to know—the details of that secret that had turned his world on end.
Now wasn’t the time to push.
She sipped again, and a razor edge of irritation made him want to do just that. Why should he care if it hurt her, after all? She’d kept this from him for ten years.
It wasn’t in him to be that cruel. He might be the one charged with keeping Florence in line, but underneath, he was still that well mannered teen who’d looked at Ellie as a symbol of everything he would never, could never be.
No, he already knew that he would make this as easy on her as he could, even if his nerves felt like a million tiny lightning bolts, ramping up his anxiety to a nearly unbearable level.
But he sat in the free chair, pulled it closer to Ellie’s. She lifted her chin, eyes wide, as he entered her personal space, and when he took one of her small hands, folded it between his large ones, he felt her entire body stiffen.