by Linda Seed
“Where you going?” he said, his voice slurred with alcohol. “I’m not done dancing.”
“But I am. I’m done.” She tried to yank her hand away from him but he grabbed her harder, hurting her wrist.
“Come back. I wasn’t doing anything.” He still wouldn’t let go. He was tugging at her, pulling.
“Back off. Back the fuck off. Let go of me.” Her voice was shrill, and her heart was pounding with adrenaline.
“Hey. Hey, hey, hey.” Ted was out from behind the bar now, a baseball bat in his hand. “Let go of her. Chuck? You let go of her before I smack your goddamned head over the left field fence. You got me?” He waved the bat menacingly.
“Yeah.” Chuck let go of her and raised both hands in the air in a gesture of surrender and innocence. “I didn’t mean nothing.”
“I don’t need this shit here. I’m trying to run a goddamned business.”
“Yeah. Okay. Yeah.”
Chuck tried to head back toward his friends at the table, but Ted raised the bat again. “No way. Go home.”
“But—”
“You’re done here. Go home.” Ted held the bat just above his shoulder like he was getting ready for a fastball.
There was some back-and-forth between Chuck and his friends regarding whether they would leave with him. They didn’t. He left alone, glaring at Aria through narrowed eyes as though it were all her fault.
Which, it seemed to her, it was.
A sudden wave of self-loathing swept over her, and she started to cry.
“Are you okay?” Ted put a hand on her arm, but she shook it off and rushed to the back of the bar and into the ladies’ room.
Liam was at the hospital in Templeton crammed into Gen’s room with various other family members and well-wishers when he got the call.
He was watching Sandra hold the baby, whose pinched skin and perplexed facial expression made him resemble Yoda, when the phone in his back pocket buzzed.
He didn’t recognize the number, but he hoped it was Aria. He stepped out into the hallway to take the call.
“Liam?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s Ted. I’m at the bar, and I’ve got a … a situation.”
Liam sat up. “What kind of situation?”
Ted filled him in. Liam hadn’t even hung up before he had grabbed his coat and was headed out the door and toward his truck.
When Liam got there, Ted came out from behind the bar to meet him before he was more than ten feet into the room.
“She came out of the bathroom about ten minutes ago,” Ted told him, gesturing toward a small corner table where Aria sat. “She wanted to leave, but I told her I couldn’t let her go until she sobered up.” He looked worried, and he was wringing a bar rag in his hands as he talked. “Sorry to bother you, man. She seems better now. But when I called you, she’d locked herself in the ladies’ room, and I could hear her in there crying …”
“Okay. I’ve got this.” Liam clapped Ted on the back. “Thanks for calling me.”
“Well … I didn’t know who else to call. She was in here with you that one time, so …”
“Yeah.” Liam nodded. “It’s okay. I’ll handle it.”
As he walked through the bar to the back, where Aria was sitting, he wasn’t at all sure he really could handle it. He was beginning to think that where Aria was concerned, he was in over his head and sinking like he had rocks tied to his feet. But walking away wasn’t an option—not now, not for him.
He got to the table and stood there awkwardly for a moment. Then he pulled out a chair and sat down across from her.
“Aria? You okay?”
Her face was red and blotchy from crying, and her mascara was smudged, making dark shadows under her eyes.
“Liam, go away.”
“Well, not until I know you’re all right.”
“Why are you even here?”
“Ted called me.”
“What? Why did he … I didn’t … but …”
She started to cry again, and he pulled her out of her chair and onto his lap, wrapping his arms around her.
“Take a breath,” he told her, his voice gentle. “Just … relax. Take a breath. You’re okay. Everything’s okay.” He had no idea whether that was true, but it sounded good, and anyway, it was all he had. He rubbed her back gently with his hand.
Liam didn’t know exactly what had happened, or why. Ted had told him some. He knew that Aria had come in alone, and that some guy had hassled her. He knew that Ted had chased the asshole off, and that Aria had retreated into the bathroom, upset, and at first had refused to come out.
But the circumstances that had led to all of that eluded him. Why was she here? Had she been meeting someone? He refused to consider the alternative: that she’d come in looking to get picked up. Even if that were true, he could worry about it later. Right now, she needed his help.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Let me take you home.”
“But, my car—”
“You can’t drive, not like this. I’ll bring you back to get it tomorrow. Come on.”
They walked out to where his truck was parked on Main Street, and he deposited her into the passenger seat with care, as though she were a piece of china or a baby bird.
She went quiet while he drove. Shame made her face hot, and she wiped at it with a wad of bar napkins she’d grabbed at Ted’s.
Liam was mercifully silent, not asking her anything about what had happened or why. If he’d asked, she might have told him everything: how she’d come here looking to get in trouble—the kind of trouble that would make him never want to see her again.
And she’d failed even at that.
Ted probably thought she was upset because of that asshole Chuck. But that wasn’t it. Chuck was an annoyance, but she’d never thought she was in any real danger.
No, she was inconsolable about what she’d almost done to Liam. He’d been cheated on before, and had been badly hurt by it. She’d known that was one way to burn the bridge between them—annihilate it so that it could never be rebuilt.
She’d wanted—no, needed—that separation from him because she knew she was losing herself to him.
In the end, she hadn’t been able to go through with it. She hadn’t been able to hurt him, even to save herself.
None of it made sense, really. She and Liam weren’t in a relationship. They weren’t dating. They weren’t anything. They’d slept together a few times, but so what? Neither of them had any claim on the other.
And yet, her heart knew what her mind hadn’t yet acknowledged.
Her heart knew that she and Liam belonged to each other.
She didn’t want that, and yet there it was. You might not want gravity to exist, but your feet were held to the earth, nonetheless. It was incontrovertible.
Aria had always thought of herself as a strong person. Despite everything she’d gone through, everything that had happened to her, she’d survived. She’d made a life for herself, protected herself. She’d gotten through. But now, knowing that she was helpless against her feelings for Liam, she was as frightened as she’d ever been.
Liam drove silently through the dark, quiet streets toward the ranch.
Liam wasn’t sure what the hell had happened back at Ted’s, but he knew one thing: Aria was either going to tell him, or she wasn’t. He couldn’t make her talk about it, any more than he could make her talk about whatever she was hiding from her past.
He drove silently, careful to keep up his casual guy act. He had to play this right, or he would lose any chance he had with her. He couldn’t pressure her, as much as he wanted to. He couldn’t nag or insist or freak the hell out, the way he wanted to. That would send her into her shell of silence, and she might never come out.
He wanted to shake her and demand to know what had happened, who had upset her, whether anyone had hurt her. And if someone had, he wanted to hunt them down and pound them into a screaming, bloody pulp. But that wouldn’t get him a
nywhere. He had to act more mature than he felt.
He had to let her make the decision to come to him.
If she didn’t, well, that would be one hell of a disappointment. But this thing wasn’t going to work any other way. Liam wouldn’t have considered himself to be particularly smart about human nature. But he did know that much.
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye as he drove. She looked smaller than usual somehow. She looked like the strain of whatever had happened had taken a toll on the physical part of her as well as the emotional.
He couldn’t just drive and do nothing, so he reached out his hand to her, and she took it. That gesture—that little bit of acceptance of his comfort—heartened him. He kept his eyes on the road, his posture in the driver’s seat relaxed, but his heart had sped up, and he felt her touch like an electric current running through him.
He wasn’t sure what was happening between them, but he knew it mattered. He knew something had changed, and there’d be no turning back from it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
When they got back to the guesthouse, neither of them spoke. Aria got out of the truck and went up the front step, and Liam followed her, thinking only to walk her to the door like a gentleman, to ask her if she was sure she was okay.
But once she had unlocked the door, she took him by the hand and led him inside. She didn’t bother to turn on the lights. She closed the door behind them and brought him into her arms, the house dark except for the silvery moonlight filtering through the windows.
She kissed him, and the kiss wasn’t like those they had shared before. Something had shifted; he could feel that in every cell of his body.
He knew he should walk away. He should ask after her welfare and then say goodnight, going back to his house and the safety of the life he’d lived before he met her. He’d been hurt before, but that would be nothing compared to what Aria could do to him. She had the power not just to hurt him, but to ruin him. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he did. And he suspected that whatever had happened tonight at Ted’s had a lot to do with her power over him and what she intended to do with it.
Walking away, as wise as it might be, didn’t feel possible. Holding her like this, in the quiet darkness, was all he wanted to do, no matter the risk. Inside her were tempests, raging storms he couldn’t fathom. But this, having her in his arms, felt like safety. It felt like shelter.
She kissed him, and he sank into the feel of her mouth on his. The warmth of her, the way she yielded to him—he was lost.
She pulled back from him, took his hand, and led him into the bedroom. The only sounds were the rustling of clothing as they undressed, and the gentle movement of their breath.
When they were both nude, she came to him and wrapped her arms around him, and the soft warmth of her erased his fear, his uncertainty. He buried his face in her hair.
She took him to the bed and they lay down together. He started to touch her, to reach for her, and she gently moved his hands away as she began to kiss him—first his mouth, then his body. He let out a soft gasp as her tongue moved from his neck toward his chest, her lips grazing over him, making his skin tingle.
He wanted to reach out and grasp her in his arms, but he knew what this was: This was her giving to him in a way she hadn’t before. This was a gift.
He kept his hands relaxed at his sides as she moved downward, running her lips and her hands down his body, over his skin. She dipped her tongue into his navel, and he trembled with the effort of lying still.
He was as hard and aching with need as he’d ever been, and when she took him into her mouth, he groaned with the pleasure of it. The ecstasy of this—of having a woman, this woman, worshipping his body in this way—transported him out of this room, out of this place, to somewhere infinitely kinder. Somewhere holy.
Liam gave himself over to her completely. This was something entirely different from what he’d had with Megan, or with anyone. This was everything.
This was Aria.
Later, when they were lying warm and sated under the covers of her bed, he told her about Gen and the baby.
“Oh, my God.” She sat up and gaped at him, a sheet tucked over her breasts. “When she said she was having contractions, I thought it was a ruse to get us alone together.”
“Yeah. So did I,” Liam admitted. “When the new baby excitement wears off, Ryan’s going to kick my ass for letting her go off alone.”
“And she said Braxton Hicks! Doesn’t that mean they weren’t real contractions?”
He grinned. “Well, they must have been pretty damned real, because the baby came out.”
“God.” She lay back on the bed, marveling. “What’s his name?”
“James Redmond Delaney. It’s nice, don’t you think?”
“It is.” She snuggled up against him, and he pulled her into his arms.
They talked for a while about Gen and Ryan, and the baby, and family. And then, just as he expected her to pull back and go quiet, she told him the truth.
“My parents are dead, Liam. That’s why I don’t talk about my family. I don’t have one.” Her father had committed suicide when she was a baby. She’d never been told the details of that, but a bit of research in her teen years had revealed that he’d hanged himself from the rafters of the family’s garage. After that, her mother had descended into a hell of depression and drug abuse. She’d gone to prison on drug charges when Aria was a toddler, and lacking any other relatives, Aria had gone into foster care.
“She got out of prison when I was six, and I went back to live with her for a little while,” Aria told Liam as he held her and stroked her back. “Maybe six months later she died of a heroin overdose while I was at school. I wasn’t the one who found her, so at least I was spared that.”
“Who did?” he asked softly.
“Our neighbor. My mom was supposed to pick me up after school, but she didn’t come. The neighbor, Mrs. Wilkens, had been listed as our emergency contact, so when the school couldn’t reach my mom, they called her.”
Liam felt the horror of the story like a gut punch, but he stayed still and quiet, afraid that if he reacted, she’d stop talking. And he didn’t want her to stop talking, now that she’d finally started.
“When Mrs. Wilkens got the call that I was sitting there in the office at school, she came to our house and knocked on the door, looking for my mom. There was no answer, but the door was unlocked, so she peeked her head in. My mother was on the sofa, already gone. They didn’t tell me what happened at first. A social worker came to the school to get me. And that was it. I never went home again.”
With what she was telling him, he would have expected tears, great shuddering sobs that he would soothe with soft, whispered words. But her tone was flat, emotionless, and that worried him more than any display of grief would have.
“I spent the rest of my childhood in foster care,” she said, and he braced himself for what was to come. Abuse? Neglect?
He was relieved that this part, at least, wasn’t as bad as he’d feared.
“The foster parents I lived with were good people,” she told him. “You hear horror stories, but … they were just people, you know? Trying to do the best they could.”
She told him how she moved through a succession of foster families, partly because of the temporary nature of foster care, and partly because her ferocious anger was more than some of them could handle, and she had to be reassigned.
When she aged out of foster care, she didn’t have much of anything to fall back on—no home, no parents to offer her a safety net until she could provide for herself.
She did have one thing going for her, though: a high school counselor who recognized both her potential and the challenges she was facing in realizing it.
“She helped me find scholarships, financial aid.” Aria’s voice warmed a little. “She helped me get registered at the local community college and walked me through the process of applying for jobs and finding a place to
live.”
That time was so full of contradictions, she told him: Terror at being cut loose from any support system she might have had, and elation at finally being able to take charge of her own life. The stress of not knowing how she was going to be able to pay the rent on the tiny apartment she shared with two roommates, and the excitement of going to school not because she was being forced to, but because she wanted to.
“I looked into you a little bit,” Liam said after a while, knowing that he had to come clean now, while they were talking freely, or risk having to explain later why he hadn’t. “I know Aria Howard isn’t your real name.”
“It is.” She pulled back from him a little so she could look at him. “I changed it legally. It’s the real name of the person I am now. It’s as real as anything else in my life. The person I was doesn’t exist anymore.”
That seemed like an important distinction to her—the question of her identity now, versus who she’d been then.
“I created this person, this version of myself,” she said. “No one else did that. Just me.”
He had so many questions. There was so much he wanted to know about how her past had affected her, how she felt about the life she had now, and—maybe most importantly—whether she was capable of loving him, when she’d known so little love over the course of her life. But he couldn’t ask her any of that, not now. She had to choose to tell it on her own, in her own time. If she even knew the answers.
“You’re lucky, Liam,” she told him as they lay in the dark, wrapped around each other. “Your family, what you have here—you’re so lucky.”
She was right. Whatever issues he might have with his family—from feeling overshadowed by his brothers, to feeling crowded by his ever-present family members, to struggling to find his own identity within the larger group—he had never in his life lacked for love.
He wanted to say something to her, something that could help to heal her scars or soothe her decades-old hurts, but there were no such words. Instead, he said, “Thank you for telling me. I know it wasn’t easy.”
The rest of it—the story of whatever tonight had been, whatever demons had driven her to go to Ted’s and do whatever it was she’d done there—could wait. She could tell him when she was ready to tell him. But he was fairly certain it had something to do with him, and with feelings that were more and stronger than she knew what to do with.