by Jillian Hart
His stomach turned cold. He couldn’t get her words out of his mind. I always feel safe with you. That’s why Nancy had dated him in the first place. As he held Bree’s chair for her and helped her scoot in to the table, he couldn’t get past the similarities.
Tough childhood. Family of origin torn apart. A humble income. Working hard to better her life. A past trauma that had made the world feel unsafe. In Nancy’s case, a former boyfriend and in Bree’s the upcoming trial that made him a safe harbor in a turbulent sea.
“Sweet!” Marcus announced from the other side of the table, his head lifting from a silent blessing and dug in. “Thanks, Brandi. I can’t remember the last time I ate anything this good.”
“Eat up, then, young man.” Lil preened, beaming with happiness at having a kid at the table, someone to mother. She tried lifting the pitcher of iced tea but couldn’t budge it. Her hand and arm shook weakly.
“Let me.” Brianna lifted the pitcher for her, leaning over her plate to fill the extra glass. “Lil, you haven’t touched your lasagna.”
“I’ve been too thrilled having you all here, dear.” The older lady’s faced wreathed with joy. Dark brown curls spilled over her light blue eyes as she gazed around the table, taking in the luxury, perhaps, of having so many visitors surrounding her. Trapped in a wheelchair, her life can’t be easy, Max reflected, unable to stop the slide of deeper affection for Brianna, who set down the pitcher, nudged Marcus’s glass toward him and loaded Lil’s spoon with lasagna.
“I can do it, dear.”
“I know, but I worry about you.” This was Brianna revealed. Pure caring and concern. She wasn’t using him, she wasn’t intentionally turning to him the way Nancy had. But that didn’t mean the outcome wouldn’t be the same.
He did his best to put the brakes on his feelings, for all the good it did. The doubts did not stop, neither did his love for her.
“I worry about you, too, with all you have to face in the upcoming months.” Meaning the trial. Lil patted Brianna’s hand in reassurance.
“I’ll be okay, don’t you worry. Because I have all of you.” She eased down next to him, smiling at everyone around the table, finishing with him. Pure adoration in that look, and he felt the honesty of it clear through.
She suddenly was too close and vulnerable, going through an exceptionally tough time, recovering from being a victim. He feared that was why she was drawn to him.
Colbie set a plate piled with food in front of him.
“Thanks. It smells incredible.”
“You’re welcome. Eat up.”
Bree filled his glass with iced tea. Lil wanted him to get some salad, too, because he needed his greens. Brandi handed him a basket of buttered bread. Marcus winked at him, obviously loving the attention and the food.
This was everything missing in his life. Love, family, pleasant interaction. Colbie was talking about a Bible study, while Lil was asking Marcus about school. A quiet drop of longing filled him, the need for a life like this, a family of his own crowded around the dinner table.
“You look as if you’re enjoying this.” Bree leaned close, her words a pleasant brush against his ear.
“Very much.” He didn’t know how else to say it. He couldn’t find the words to tell her, and especially not with so many people around. Bittersweet—finally finding exactly what he needed and at the same time suspecting it might not turn out to be his. She would recover, strengthen and might need a man very different from him.
When he bowed his head for a quick blessing, his prayers were for Brianna. For her happiness, for her to find what she needed in life.
Even if it was not him, in the end.
“I can’t tell you what this means to me.” Bree held the big bucket of buttered popcorn as Max settled into the chair beside her. The lights began to dim, she lost sight of the rest of the group farther down the row. The rumble of conversations in the mostly empty theater diminished. “Thanks for taking everyone out with us.”
“No problem. I know how important your family is to you.” He tucked the colas into the chairs’ cup holders. “Besides, Lil looks like she’s getting a kick out of all this.”
“It’s a treat for her.” She couldn’t help glancing down the aisle, where Brandi, Marcus and Colbie sat next to Lil in the reserved for wheelchairs section. They were sharing tubs of popcorn, courtesy of Max. “You’re a good guy. You’ve gone two notches up in my estimation.”
“Back at ya.” He tore the wrapping off two straws, intent on the task. Something was missing. Somehow he felt more distant, as if he had taken a step back.
Was it her doubts making her feel that way? Throughout the evening, she’d watched him. He’d talked and laughed over the meal, he’d invited everyone to the family-rated movie as his treat, he’d helped Lil with her wheelchair and showed her sisters respect. Every moment, her love for him changed. It had doubled, impossibly larger and more important than it had been before.
She hadn’t known love could do that. That it could keep transforming and expanding, taking you right along with it. Her feet were no longer on that mountain, but floating above it. As if she had hold of a helium balloon, a very tiny one, impossibly holding her up in the air.
The fall would be even more treacherous. If that didn’t scare her enough, not falling was even more perilous. She felt trepidation shiver through her as he stretched his arm and settled it around her shoulders.
“Come closer,” he whispered, his voice a beloved sound.
Why did love peel a person away in layers, one after another? Just when you thought you couldn’t bear the exposure anymore, it went deeper. This wasn’t like anything she’d known before. The fear of getting closer, the fear of failing had doubled, too. She felt every shadow within, every flaw. History seemed to murmur to her about her mother’s chaotic relationships, Lil’s sad one, her dad, his jail sentence and how he’d treated everyone he’d loved. Things that ran like a major earthquake fault through her life. Things he needed to understand first, before he could truly be in love with her.
“You can always lean on me. No matter what.” He drew her nearer, a strong, good man who went beyond dreams. Who stood for what was right, who never faltered in the dark. When he’d been shot, he was not afraid of shadows, or of it happening again. Nothing rattled his world.
Trust this will work out, she told herself and rested her cheek against his steely shoulder. She loved being able to lean on him. “I appreciate your offer, but you might want to change your mind down the road.”
“Why would you say that? Plan on leaving me for a better guy?” His tone came lightly, layered over seriousness.
“What better guy could there be?” She couldn’t imagine one. He was like a prince out of a child’s storybook, hewn of the right stuff.
“Says the storybook princess.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead.
His tenderness made her eyes burn. She blinked, feeling as if the helium balloon she was holding on to had suddenly jerked her upward another thousand feet. “I’m no princess,” she argued. “More like a pauper.”
“You’re perfection, Brianna.”
Perfection? She was so far from it, it wasn’t even funny.
He believed it. He gazed at her as if she were the most precious thing on earth to him. As if she were without flaws and a past, without imperfections or foibles. As if he would live and die for her.
No one had ever looked at her like that before. Her love for him doubled again, lifting her higher than she had ever been. Than she could ever feel comfortable being. What would happen when he began to see her differently, as she was?
A smart woman would stop this before she got hurt. Before she stopped defying gravity, the balloon popped and she fell back to solid ground, destroyed.
He’s going to see the real you soon enough, a thought popped into her head. What are you going to do until then?
Hold on, she decided. As hard as it was to hope, as difficult as it was to let him closer, that’s
what she was going to do. She would not give in to fear. Nowhere on earth was as safe as being in his arms. He was her beloved, her chance for a fairy tale come true.
She would believe. Regardless how high the fall, she took the risk, opened the last door to her heart and snuggled more deeply against him.
As if he understood, he tightened his arms around her, holding on.
Chapter Fourteen
“My favorite part was when the dude jumped in the helicopter, figured out how to fly it and then chased the bad guys down the freeway.” Marcus, in the truck’s back seat, was at it again. The kid was a constant chatterbox. “Maybe instead of buying me a car one day, you could let me get a chopper.”
“Sure, that’s just what I’m gonna do.” Wryly, he chanced a glance at the woman in the seat beside him. “I’m sorry about this. I thought it wouldn’t be so bad if he tagged along. But you and I can’t get a word in edgewise.”
“I’m totally insulted.” Bree bit her lip, trying not to laugh. “So much, that it’s my treat next time. Maybe I could bring a movie over. Pop some corn.”
“Max’ll spring for the pizza.” Marcus had no trouble volunteering him.
Probably because the kid knew he’d do anything for Brianna. She was a piece of his soul. When he wanted to reach out and lay his hand over hers, he kept his grip on the steering wheel. When he wanted to say, “name the day,” he kept silent.
“Pepperoni, dude.” Marcus was apparently thinking about food again. “We should do it this week. Whatcha think?”
“I can’t this week.” Brianna took a slow breath, as if she were gathering her courage. “I’ve got some stuff to deal with. My teaching practice sessions start at one of the grade schools.”
“Cool. What about the weekend? It’ll be like your third date, right? Hey, you don’t mind if I hang out with you, do you?”
“I would miss you if you weren’t there.” Earnest, she twisted in her seat to add her smile.
“Sweet!”
“Glad to see you two have figured out my social life for me.” He grinned. “Did either of you ask me if I was busy?”
“You aren’t.” Marcus answered for him. “He’s never busy. Oh, that’s my phone. I’ve got to get it. It’s Ashleigh from the bookstore night.”
“Your brother has a girlfriend?” she asked over the sound of Marcus answering his phone with a suave “Yo.”
“He wishes, although I hope his prospects are good.” Max slowed to take the turn into the trailer park. “You’ve gotten quiet. The kid might have been making a lot of noise, but I noticed.”
“I figured. You kept glancing at me while you were driving.” Night had fallen, and lights glowed in windows as they drove by.
“You worried about tomorrow?”
“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t.” She squared her shoulders. “I have a question for you.”
“Sure.”
“Do you think the reason love doesn’t work out is because of a person’s flaws?” She couldn’t stand to see the realization dawn on his face, so she turned toward the window. Home after home flashed by, trees waved in the wind, and she felt her shadows. The face reflected back at her in the dark glass was more hollow than whole, and her pulse galloped in fast, thick beats as she waited for his answer. As she waited for him to realize she was speaking about herself.
“I think relationships fail for more important reasons.” He thought of his own experience and of his parents’. “It’s easy to grow apart. It’s easy to want to love someone more than you actually do. To mistake security for love. To be wrong about what you want.”
“And a person’s flaws?”
“Why, have you started to notice a few more of mine?” His tone stayed light, but there was more she could not read. Where once he had been revealed to her, she could not feel his heart.
That is what is missing, she realized too late. The connection that bound them, the tie of affection between her soul and his was gone. As close as she was to him, she felt oddly alone.
“I think you are my knight in shining armor.” Her voice cracked, proof of her stubborn love for him. “You’ve done so much for me without a thought for yourself. Look at tonight. I know what you’ve done.”
“I’m guilty of taking you to a movie.”
She did not know what emotions shaded his eyes and deepened the darkness around him, ones he tried to hide with a wink and a grin. She didn’t know if she could hide her ever-increasing affection. “You took my family out, you made Lil happy, which has made both Colbie and Brandi happy. And me—”
“What about you?”
“I can count on you. That means the world to me.”
“It is my pleasure.” Sweet, sure, but there was more depth she could not see. He slowed down to turn onto the last street. “I know it’s going to be a busy week for you, and you have school stuff going on, and the trial coming up after that. I meant what I said back in the theater. I’m here for you. No matter what.”
“I know.” There was the Max she knew, stalwart and amazing. But so distant. He could have been a stranger. She remembered the man she’d spotted in the bakery that night when Billy had been a no-show. She had marveled at Mr. Perfect, wondering what it would be like to feel his hand in hers, this man who at first impression was far out of her league.
He was even more now, and everything she had ever wanted. But there was so much he didn’t know about her.
“You never answered my question.” The words came haltingly and far too thin, laced with emotion and sadness. Sorrow, because she felt as if she were somehow losing a measure of closeness with him.
“I think flaws are different from faults.” He stopped the truck in the gravel in front of the picket fence. “Faults are what can break a person or a relationship. Lying, cheating, pretending to be someone you’re not.”
“And flaws?” Her hand trembled as she released the seat belt. She hung on his answer, with both hope and reluctance. When it came to love, she did not know if blind faith was enough.
“There’s someone sitting on the front porch. Do you recognize him?”
“What?” She glanced over the dash, peering through the dark windshield as headlights swept close, spotlighting the tall, too lean man who was rising, trying to see who had pulled up.
Dad. Bree went cold all the way to her soul. She blinked, part of her not wanting this to be true. The last time she’d heard news of him, he’d been asking Luke for money from an out-of-state federal prison. It couldn’t be him. Not now, not when Max was here. It was too much.
“He looks like a vagrant.” Max cut the engine and released his belt. “Let me deal with this. You stay here.”
“No!” The word rang too sharp, and she winced, hearing the raw-edged panic. “It’s no vagrant. Not officially, anyway.”
“You know who that is?”
She nodded, not quite able to say the words. “I’m going to go talk to him before Colbie pulls up. This is going to upset Lil something terrible.”
“No way am I going to let you talk to him alone. Not in the dark.” Max had his door open and his feet on the ground before she could stop him.
Dad—Mick McKaslin—pushed open the little gate, quite as if he owned the place. His time in jail had not been kind to him. His face was haggard and hollow, his hair thin and too long, gone gray. His clothes were wrinkled and too big for his frame. His grin came just as widely.
“Brandilyn! I thought that was you.”
She slid down from the truck before Max could circle around and get the door for her. She caught his surprised glance. She and Brandi might look alike, but anyone who knew them got it right. Revealing.
“I’m Brianna.” She was aware of Marcus hopping down behind her, coming to stand beside her. Max stood protectively between her and Mick, his feet braced, like a hero of old.
“Bree? Is that you? I never could tell the two of you apart.” He flashed his grin, the one that made him look disarmingly like a good old guy, but it
no longer worked with her.
“Max, this is my father.” She drew in a sustaining breath, praying for courage before she said the words that would ruin everything between them. “He’s apparently just finished serving a jail sentence for counterfeiting and fraud and a few other things.”
Max’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, and for a moment he looked as if he were about to speak, but he didn’t. The night darkened, and when the wind gusted between them it carried an icy edge. The man she loved turned into a distant shadow, nothing more.
His voice sounded hollow when he finally spoke. “And you are just telling this right now?”
“I know.” She bowed her head, not wanting to watch him retreat further.
“Good to meet you, Max, is it?” Mick stuck out his hand, as if he didn’t have a thing to be ashamed of. As if he were a reformed man. She thought of all the times he’d been reformed, and born again. More times than was believable in any man’s lifetime. “Who is that pulling up? Is that my little Colbie?”
Bree thought of Lil in the car, and how hurt she was going to be at having to see Mick again. “Max, it would be best if you left. You and Marcus don’t want to be part of this.”
“I can take a little trouble.” His hand caught hers. “Do you need my help?”
She couldn’t stand the spark of emotion zinging from his touch. The understanding concern of his tone made her feel an inch tall. I’m not like Nancy, she wanted to tell him, but she had lied. By omission, sure, but it was still a lie. Ashamed, she withdrew her hand and her heart. “No, I’ll be fine without you, Max. Go ahead and go.”
In the background she realized Brandi was getting out of Colbie’s car, hands fisted, jaw set, defensive.
“Brandi, it’s good to see you.” Dad jovially turned toward her. “I would know you anywhere. How have you been, baby girl?”
The shame spread like poison ivy, itchy and burning and unbearable. Max was turning away, appearing torn. When he held out his hand, she couldn’t take it. All that he offered—love, trust, dreams—how could she reach for them now? The lie of omission stood between them, maybe too much like the story he’d told her about Nancy. Lil’s outcry of alarm and anguish stained the beautiful night. Dad’s pleasant, “Lil, I’m crushed you don’t want me here,” was proof that she could not escape her past.