Burned (Cunningham Security Book 5)

by A. K. Evans

  “Really?” I asked.

  Pierce pulled back and looked in my eyes. With a fierce intensity in them, he maintained, “Yes, really. You’ve got curves in all the right places, beautiful. I love them and they’ll be the first to go if you push to drop the number on the scale.”

  I tilted my head to the side and stared at Pierce as my heart burst with love for him. “The number on the scale isn’t necessarily what I’m striving for,” I began. “I just want to feel good and look good.”

  “Trust me when I tell you, Zara…you look well beyond good. You’re incredibly sexy. And you just told me you feel the best you have in years. We’ll keep going on our hikes to stay active and fit, and you should keep doing the yoga if it’s making you feel good. But do all of that only to stay healthy, not because you’re looking to lose weight. Believe me when I tell you, you don’t need to lose an ounce.”

  I lowered my mouth to Pierce’s and rasped against his lips, “I love you, Pierce.”

  “Love you too, beautiful.”

  Pierce and I stayed there for a long time, kissing and touching. Once we decided we’d had enough time in the pool, we dried off, changed, and packed up our stuff and our pets.

  “You want to stay at my house tonight?” Pierce wondered.

  Nodding, I replied, “I’d love to. Can we just stop by my place so I can pick up a few things?”

  “Sure. Afterward, we’ll take Blaze and Callie back to my house and drop them off. I want to take you out to dinner.”

  “I’d love that,” I exclaimed. “We haven’t gone on a date in a long time. Can we get dinner and go to a movie after?”

  Curling his hand around the side of my neck, he stroked his thumb over the skin at my throat. “Anything you want, Zara.”

  With that, we locked up his parents’ house and left.

  When we got back to my place, we hauled the pets inside before I declared, “I’m going to take a quick shower so I can get this chlorine off me.”

  “Okay,” Pierce said to my departing backside. “I’ll get Blaze and Callie fed while you’re doing that.”

  “Thank you.”

  I was looking forward to a night out with Pierce, so I hustled into the bathroom and got down to business. By the time I emerged, Callie and Blaze were eating and Pierce was ready to hop in the shower. While he showered, I finished getting myself ready.

  Pierce was still in the shower when I moved out of the bedroom and back into the kitchen. Just then, there was a knock at my door. I never got visitors, so I was really caught off guard. Even still, I moved to the door and opened it.

  Then, I stood frozen in the doorway.

  My mother was staring back at me.

  With wide eyes, I called, “Mom? What are you doing here?”

  “We need to fix this, Zara,” she began, stepping inside as I stepped back to allow her in. Blaze came and stood by my side, but I gave him a quick pat to let him know everything was fine. My mother looked down at Blaze, ignored him, and went on, “Too much time has passed since we last spoke to each other.”

  I blinked my eyes and stood there in disbelief. “So, you flew out here to do that? There are phones that might have made it a little easier.”

  “If I waited for you to call me, we’d never speak again,” she clipped.

  Perhaps that’s because you hung up on me the last time we were on the phone, I thought.

  Instead of saying what I was thinking and feeling, I felt myself shutting down. I did not want to do this. Not here. Not now.

  But she flew six hours to get here.

  I couldn’t very well tell her that I had plans to go on a date.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized.

  “Why haven’t you called?” she wondered.

  Silence stretched between us a moment as I looked to the ground and admitted, “I don’t know what I’d talk to you about if I called.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Are you serious? I’m your mother and you have nothing to talk to me about? This will never get better, will it?”

  “Not overnight,” I insisted.

  “Do you have any idea when you might get over it? How long are you going to hold on to this grudge? This is what you do. You cut people out and never talk to them again. I mean, look what happened with Nicola. She’s dead now. You can’t go back and fix it.”

  “That’s enough!” Pierce’s voice boomed.

  I jumped, completely caught off guard and never having heard him so angry.

  My mom’s eyes snapped to him. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me,” he started. “I just stood here and listened to everything you said to Zara. You’re not going to talk to her like that.”

  “She’s my daughter,” my mom shot back.

  “Yeah?”

  My mom nodded.

  “Maybe you should start acting like it.”

  My mom’s eyes went wide. “How dare you speak to me like that?”

  “How dare you speak to your daughter like that?” he challenged. “If I recall correctly, the last time the two of you spoke, you hung the phone up on her. She’s under no obligation to call you, especially if that’s how you’re going to treat her.”

  “I don’t need your permission to have a conversation with her.”

  Pierce shook his head and agreed, “No, you don’t. But I’m telling you right now that I’m not going to stand here and listen to you try to cut her down or make her feel like everything that’s going on in your family is her fault.”

  My mom rolled her eyes and threw out, “Well there are two sides to every story, so make sure you keep that in mind.”

  That was like a punch to the gut. I knew I wasn’t perfect, but if there was one thing I wasn’t, it was a liar. I couldn’t believe she said that.

  “Are you suggesting that Zara told me lies about what happened?”

  My mom’s face paled. She knew me. She knew I was always forthcoming and honest. “I didn’t say that,” she disputed.

  “You implied it,” he maintained.

  Clearly having had enough of Pierce, my mom turned her attention back to me. “Did I come here for nothing?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was still in such shock that she was even standing there. “I honestly don’t know what to say, Mom,” I admitted. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I’m trying to work through it all. But it’s not easy. A lot has happened.”

  “It’s not easy for me either,” she quipped.

  “I never said that it was!”

  As tense as I was, my shoulders fell. This was so incredibly frustrating. Part of the reason I moved away is because this is what my relationship with my mother had become. The two of us going around in circles, both hurt by everything that had been said and done, trying to find a way to move past it.

  “This was obviously a mistake,” my mom concluded.

  I shook my head, beyond frustrated.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” I started. “You’ve had a six-hour flight, at a minimum, to prepare for this. I’ve had all of about five minutes, and most of it has been with you yelling at me. I’m trying to figure out what to do now.”

  “Don’t do anything, Zara. Obviously, it’s not worth it to you,” she snapped.

  “You’re going to stop,” Pierce interrupted, speaking to my mother.

  “Pardon?”

  “You showed up here unannounced, expecting your daughter to just be here waiting to have this conversation with you. It was rude of you to assume that that was okay. Zara and I had plans for this evening, and you obviously don’t care that she has other things in her life that aren’t whatever drama you are trying to cook up. I’ve watched this woman struggle over the last several weeks with the state of her relationship with you because it bothers her that this is clearly what it has become. I’m not going to tolerate you suggesting that she doesn’t give a shit.”

  “So you’re going to tell me what I can and can’t say to my own child?” she challenged.
>
  Pierce nodded and explained, “Absolutely, especially when that child happens to be the woman that I love.”

  My mom held Pierce’s eyes a moment before they came to mine. I still had no idea what to say.

  Thankfully, Pierce’s phone rang and broke the awkward silence.

  “Yeah?” he answered. I watched as his body went alert. Mere seconds passed before he said, “Call Michaels. I’m ten minutes out.”

  Pierce pulled the phone from his ear and lamented, “Sorry, beautiful, I’ve got to go. That was Holden and our guy is about to prove he’s our guy.”

  Crap.

  I needed him now more than ever.

  Even still, I insisted, “It’s okay. Go. Be careful.”

  He gave me a squeeze and a kiss on the forehead before he turned to my mom. “There’s no way I’d leave Zara here given the hostility in this room if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. You need to respect whatever it is that she wants to have happen here. If she’s not prepared to have this conversation right now, accept that and either find something else to talk about or come back when she’s ready to talk about it. And if she agrees to have this conversation, I expect you’ll do it without upsetting her any more than she already is. If I come back and find you’ve burned her all over again, I’m not going to be happy.”

  Wow.

  I knew a lot of people, and not once had anyone stood up to my mom, especially not for me, the way that Pierce just did.

  “I’m her mother. I think she owes me the same respect,” my mom declared.

  Pierce shook his head in disbelief. “Not once in all the months that I’ve known Zara have I ever witnessed her being rude or disrespectful to anyone. I have no concerns about the way that she’ll treat you, even if you choose to be nasty to her.”

  With that, he was done conversing with my mother. Pierce turned toward me again, touched his mouth to mine, and asked, “Is Blaze okay to stay with you until I’m done?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he promised. “If you need me, though, you call. Okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Love you, beautiful.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Pierce gave me another kiss before he walked to the door and saw himself out.

  I stood there, staring at the door, wondering where I’d be if Pierce hadn’t come into my life. After several long moments, I managed to pull my eyes from the door and turned to face my mom.

  “He seems controlling,” she stated.

  Anger speared through me. “He’s off limits,” I ordered.

  Shock registered on her face.

  I went on, “You can say whatever you want about me, but you don’t get Pierce. He has been nothing but loving and protective of me from the day that I met him. He just proved, once again, why he deserves to be in my life.”

  “What?”

  “He knows what’s happening here. He knows about everything that has happened with Michelle, you, and me. Given that he truly loves me, he won’t stand for seeing me hurt. So, he stood up to you because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you love someone. You do whatever is necessary to prove it, especially when someone else is hurting them.”

  She sighed. “Zara, we’ve done this a million times already. I’ve already told you that I knew what Michelle did was wrong. There is no excuse for what she did. I had your brother to think about, though.”

  “You also said that he admitted what she was doing was wrong,” I reminded her.

  “Yeah?”

  “So, then why didn’t anyone stand up for me?”

  “What did you want us to do? All we could do, which is what we did, was ask what happened to the afghans. You already knew what happened to the jewelry. She’s her own person and makes her own decisions, though.”

  “I understand that, but you enabled her. Instead of giving her an ultimatum and kicking her out when I gave you the proof that she was a thief, you allowed her to continue to live there. Why did you make it okay for her to do what she did?”

  My mom took in a deep breath and blew it out. “Here we go again. We’re going to just keep going in circles, Zara. Is that what you want? Do you like living in this turmoil?”

  I stared at her, dumbfounded.

  “My decision to finally move across the country should have been an indication that I couldn’t stand living in the turmoil. I hate it.”

  “So why don’t you let it go and move on?”

  “It’s not that easy,” I stated.

  “Why not?”

  “Lots of reasons, the most crucial of which is that I don’t trust that my family won’t turn their back on me again.”

  “We aren’t talking about anybody else right now. We are talking about you and me. Are you saying you don’t trust me?”

  I stared at her, feeling the harsh reality settle between us. I didn’t need to say anything for her to know the answer, but I eventually replied, “Not to stand beside me when someone else is hurting me.”

  My mother looked truly devastated at my admission. I felt horrible for making her feel that way, but I needed to be honest. I truly believed that if she didn’t know just how much her choices in this situation impacted my life and the state of our relationship, there was no way we’d ever be able to move beyond it.

  “I’m sorry,” I lamented, struggling a bit to talk through the tightness in my throat. “I never thought in a million years that we’d end up here. I have days that go by where something happens and I’ll think how I wish I could call you and tell you. But then I remember this and how broken we are. And I think to myself in those moments that whatever success I may want to share with you won’t matter to you anyway.”

  Tears filled her eyes. “Zara, I love you. I want to hear what’s happening in your life. I miss you.”

  God, I missed her, too.

  I just didn’t know how to get past the hurt I was feeling. The trust between us was shattered, and I didn’t think we’d ever be able to get it back.

  “I love you, too.”

  “Please forgive me,” she pleaded.

  “I want to,” I replied honestly. “But I can’t force it. I can’t fabricate forgiveness for the sake of it. If I told you right now that I forgave you, I’d just be saying the words. You wouldn’t see any actions from me that indicate that I truly forgive you. And I know you well enough to know that if I made that statement, you’d expect we’d be able to forge ahead like none of this happened.”

  She shook her head, utterly disappointed. I didn’t know if that disappointment was over the situation or worse, if it was because she couldn’t believe she raised someone who could be so cold.

  “What can I do to fix this?” she wondered.

  I offered her a sympathetic look. “I’m not sure it’s something you can do now that’ll fix it. I won’t lie. It’s a bit difficult for me to know that you’re allowing Michelle to live with you when you know what she’s done to me.”

  “So, if I kick her out and possibly lose your brother as a result, would that make you happy?”

  “See? That’s the problem. In fact, there are two of them. First, if he chooses to never talk to you again because of what his wife did, that should tell you something about him. It has nothing to do with me and yet you want to guilt me into feeling bad for you over a choice he’d be making. Second, I shouldn’t have to tell you how you can fix it because it never should have gotten to this point. You should have had my back from the beginning and never once doubted what I was telling you. I’ve never lied to you. She lied to your face more than once.”

  My mother sighed. She’d heard all of this before. We both had.

  Even still, I added, “The truth of the matter is that me telling you to kick her out is going to take away the fact that you already chose her over me before now. That’s honestly really hard for me to come to terms with. Pierce’s sister just had a baby a few months ago, and I see just how protective she is of her little boy. That’s the
way it’s supposed to be.”

  Shaking her head, she warned, “One day, Zara, you’re going to have children of your own. And I pray you’ll never experience with your children what I’m dealing with right now. I hope you’ll never be put in a position where you’re stuck in the middle between their disagreements.”

  My eyes widened in disbelief.

  “First of all, this isn’t about a disagreement. And the initial problem wasn’t between me and my brother. It was between me and Michelle. Everything got worse when my family, my brother included, decided that siding with a thief was the way to handle this. She took my grandmother’s jewelry. You know what that meant to me and you didn’t do anything to protect that. And maybe you couldn’t have stopped it from happening, but you could have shown her that you’d not tolerate it.”

  With that, my mom and I fell into silence.

  And that’s how it always ended.

  We both said all the things we felt we needed to say, but we never actually moved past any of it. I was too hurt by the betrayal and she was always trying to get me to see it from her perspective. Since I was unable to do that, we never moved forward.

  After nearly five full minutes of unbearable silence, she finally asked, “Would you show me your flower shop?”

  Wanting to do anything other than what we were currently doing, I nodded.

  Then, I took my mother downstairs and showed her my shop.

  Two times.

  Two times I’ve had to walk away from Zara when I didn’t want to because of this case.

  The first time, she’d just asked to go swimming. While it may not seem like a big deal to most, it was huge for Zara. And no sooner did we get ourselves all ready to go when Detective Baines called to tell me about the fire at the tax firm.

  Now, I had received a call from Holden telling me he’d just followed our suspect, Joe, from his home to The Rusty Spur, a long-standing tavern in Windsor. At the moment he was on the phone with me, Holden said he was watching Joe stand outside the tavern as he smoked his cigar. In any other situation, I might have called it coincidence, but I had to believe Holden knew what he was doing. He was brilliant, so if he had any doubts about if this was our guy, he wouldn’t have called.