Untouched

by Lauren Hawkeye

  “Is something wrong?” He looked alarmed, and Alexa couldn’t quite hold back a chuckle, the first time she’d felt like laughing in a while.

  “Depends,” she answered slowly, trying to keep her expression blank.

  “On what?” He moved to stand in front of her, shading her eyes from the sun.

  “Depends on whether or not you’re going to officially move in with me.” Her stomach did a flip-flop as she took in the startled expression that crossed his face.

  He was shocked? Well, too bad. She wasn’t backpedalling. He could take it or leave it.

  “You’re staying, then?” Nate’s voice sounded suspiciously tight, and she eyed him warily.

  “Yes.” She drew the one word out into several syllables. “Right in this apartment, in fact. What did you think I was going to do?”

  She watched as he huffed out a deep breath.

  “I thought that you might want to get away from here.” He regarded her thoughtfully. “Away from Arizona. Just... away.”

  “Away from you?” She wanted to flinch, then gave herself a mental smack. If this man hadn’t been scared away by what had happened in the last week, then she was pretty sure he was here to stay.

  She couldn’t help being a bit nervous, regardless.

  “You can try.” Nate’s response was quick and not a little feral, making her grin internally. “Wherever you were going, however much time you needed... I would have gone with you and given it to you.”

  He reached into his pocket, and suddenly Alexa felt frissons of nerves skating over her skin—and unlike so much of what she had been feeling lately, these one were light as champagne, frothy and oh so sweet.

  “But your decision just means that I get to give you this sooner.” When Nate’s hand withdrew from his pocket, it was holding a small blue velvet box.

  Alexa looked from it, to Nate, and back to the box. She wanted to throw out a snappy remark, but her mouth and throat had gone utterly dry.

  When she again looked up, she found Nate watching her carefully through narrowed eyes.

  “Wha—what’s that?”

  He took her hands, twined his long fingers in her own. And when her big, sexy former cop dropped down to one knee in front of her, Alexa felt her own knees wobble.

  “Like I said, I was prepared to hold onto this as long as I needed to.” The sunlight glinted off of Nate’s hair, his eyes as he solemnly looked up at her. “But truthfully, I bought it after the first time we made love. We hadn’t known each other very long—we still haven’t. But when I was inside of you, when I had you in my arms, I just thought... there she is. The piece that I’ve been missing.”

  Tears welled up in Alexa’s eyes, but these ones were happy. “Nate. Nate. I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t say anything yet. Let me ask the question, woman.”

  Alexa felt the laugh bubble out of her, but kept her expression down to a smirk.

  “I’m not going back to the prison.” Nate told her, his expression darkening for a moment. “I can’t. I’ll kill him. And more blood isn’t the answer. But Gabe wants a deputy. I think that’s what I would do... if we stayed here.”

  “If?” She ignored the allusion to Higgins. He had no place in this moment. No place in her new life.

  “It’s up to you.” Nate chose that moment to open the velvet box. The ring inside caught the sunlight, sparkling in a rainbow of colors. “We’re bound, you and I. I think we have been since the moment we met. As long as I’m with you, I’ll be happy. I don’t care where that is.”

  “Nate.” This man was so many things. A cop, a prison guard. A demanding lover and a gentle man. Rough around the edges, with the soul of a poet.

  She couldn’t imagine being happy with anyone else. Sucking in a breath, she waited for him to ask the question... so that she could scream yes, before he realized what a damaged woman he was binding himself to.

  Except, of course, he already knew that. Already knew, and loved her just the same.

  The silence stretched out, and Alexa was finally forced to let out her breath. She glared down at Nate, who not so successfully stifled a laugh and pulled the ring from the box.

  “Even after a few days, I knew that diamonds didn’t suit you. They’re cold. And you—you’re the bright spot in my world. A rainbow in a sea of grey.” His clever fingers held the ring up to the light, and Alexa was all the more dazzled, knowing the thought he’d put into it. “When I saw this, I knew it was for you. It’s supposed to be something called a family ring, with birthstones for the parents and the children, but I had them add a stone in the colors of the rainbow.”

  A family ring. Alexa thought of Ellie’s comment earlier.

  How perfect.

  “Family are the ones who stay.” Tears started to well up as she fell to her knees, held her hand up in Nate’s face, and waved it excitedly. “Mine. Put it on. Now!”

  Nate laughed, long and hard, as he slid the ring onto her finger. “I love you, Alexa Kendrick. We’re family now. We’re going to stay.”

  “I love you, Nate Fury.” Alexa whispered back, letting his light lift her from her own darkness. “Wherever we go, that won’t change.”

  And in that moment, the hole that had been inside of her for the last year was filled, not with horrible memories, or with trauma, but with love.

  Nate had indeed lent her his strength for a little while, and she had no doubt that she’d need it again, as she continued to heal. Two broken halves, making a whole.

  No, not anymore.

  Two whole people...

  But two people who were better together.

  THE END

  Excerpt from UNSPOKEN

  Prequel to UNTOUCHED

  As Ellie Kendrick drove slowly down the narrow strip of asphalt that led to her destination, the ten years that she had been gone slowly evaporated into the dry Arizona heat.

  The shop stood at the end of the block, a square structure of crumbling grey brick that sat apart from its neighbors. The wooden sign on the front of building had never been particularly bright or eye catching, but now it—and the dull brick walls—looked like a photo that had sat out too long in the sun.

  Pulling her rental sedan to the side of the road—always plenty of parking to be had in Florence, Arizona—Ellie stepped out of the car that smelled like vinyl upholstery and industrial strength cleaner, and into her past.

  The street was empty as she approached the door, her low heels clicking on the cracked sidewalk. Late evening in Florence meant shift changeover at the prisons had just finished, with half the town facing a long dozen hours inside a cement block, the other spending precious time with their families, eating their dinners, showering off the desert dust, crawling into bed.

  Ellie traced her fingers over the letters of the faded sign, once coral over turquoise blue. Estelle’s Blooms had been meant as a bright spot in town, or so Ellie’s grandmother had always said.

  Now, it looked like nothing so much as one of those black and white photographs that someone had tried to liven up with splashes of artificial color. Nothing real remained, and it would be so easy for Ellie to get back in her rental car, to escape the way she had so many years ago.

  Of course, then she hadn’t had a choice. Just, she supposed as she jingled the weight of the heavy, old key in her hand, as she didn’t really have much of one now.

  Ellie sighed and tucked a wayward strand of her reddish gold hair behind her ear. It flopped back exactly where it had been before she’d moved it, hanging listlessly in the desiccated heat.

  The sound of a car door slamming several streets over had her moving, fitting the key to the lock, where the brass slid in so smoothly, almost loosely, that Ellie figured it wouldn’t have taken much to pick it, had she been so inclined.

  And ten, fifteen years ago, she would have been. Which was why she wasn’t particularly eager to be standing around on the street when the next person moseyed on by.

  The door opened wi
th a creak, and Ellie winced, her organized brain automatically making a note to grease it up, even though she didn’t really care one way or the other. At least, she hadn’t thought she did, but as the heavy door croaked its way shut behind her, and she found herself inside a building she hadn’t entered for over a decade, she was struck with an undeniable sense of melancholy.

  At first glance, the interior of Estelle’s Blooms looked exactly the same. But when Ellie tilted her head, looked through the dancing dust motes, she saw that she’d been viewing the small flower shop through the distorted lens of memory.

  The forest green shelves full of cheap glass vases, the laminate covered counters. The stack of stained plastic buckets behind the counter, the walk in cooler that someone—thank God—had thought to empty of the bright roses, the painted daisies, the mums and the bundles of baby’s breath and leatherleaf and eucalyptus that typically lined the benches inside.

  She hadn’t been overly excited about the prospect of dealing with the rotten sludge of decaying flowers if no one had thought to clear things out after Estelle’s death.

  But the cooler was clean, the faintest hint of bleach lingering in the frigid air. And through it, almost hidden in the corner—the door that led to the apartment upstairs. The place Ellie had called home for most of her life.

  The place she’d been unceremoniously removed from.

  Half turning to go back to her rental car, to get the small bag that held the clothes and toiletries that she’d brought, Ellie instead found herself drawn up the small, rickety staircase, and into the living room of the cramped apartment she’d once shared with Estelle. As with downstairs, things here seemed much the same—the dingy beige carpet, worn down from years of footprints… the peach paint on the walls, a color that had been popular before Ellie had even been born… the ceramic dishes of potpourri so old it had lost its scent. But over it all lay a sense of decay, of neglect, one that combined with the very faint scent of Estelle’s perfume to pull at Ellie’s skin, drowning her in its intensity.

  It was suffocating. Quickly Ellie crossed to the screened window that sat above a television… one so old she’d likely have to hire a crew of neighborhood kids to haul it out for her.

  If their parents, once Ellie’s contemporaries, would let them have anything to do with her.

  She flipped the lock, then put some muscle into turning the handle that cranked the window open. She considered popping the screen out to let more air in, but even if the metal frame hadn’t been sealed in place with thick layers of gummy white paint, she doubted it would have done much good.

  Years spent in the brisk chill of the Rocky Mountains had wiped the memory of the arid heat away. It was very nearly intolerable, sucking the moisture right from her skin, making her tongue swell with the need for a drink of water.

  Good thing she would only been here for a few days. Just long enough to figure out what to do with the mess that Estelle had left behind. She could already feel the anxiety that just being back in this town brought her, pressing down with a weight like water.

  The very thought had nausea roiling in her belly. Desperate for a breath of fresh, crisp air that she knew wouldn’t come, Ellie nevertheless pressed her face to the dusty mesh screen.

  The small street stretched out before her, a black ribbon of tar that she knew would be gooey from baking all day in the sun. In the distance she could see one of the town’s nine prisons… if she remembered correctly, it was the one that held Arizona’s death row. From this view, the complex consisted of a dismal series of concrete buildings, set far back from a fence made menacing by coils of wire that anyone with a brain knew were far more deadly than they looked.

  For the inmates housed in those dull, soul sucking buildings awaiting their punishments, there was no way out. No way past the towers of armed guards, the electrical fence. Though she couldn’t condone the things they’d done to be condemned there, Ellie nevertheless felt a sense of kinship with those souls, right in that moment. That hopelessness, the sensation that no matter how fast she ran, she would never make it free of the shackles of her past.

  Movement from below caught her eye. Looking down, she watched as a shiny white sedan emblazoned with the word Sheriff ambled down the street. Her pulse picked up just knowing there was a cop in the vicinity, thanks to the rebellious teenage years she’d spent in this very town.

  It accelerated even further when the police car pulled up right behind her rental car, a deliberate action on a street that was nearly empty. Ellie listened to her own breath rasping in, shuddering out as time seemed to slow. She watched as a lean, lanky figure in well-worn jeans and a short sleeved blue button down that seemed to have lost some of its crispness in the heat unfolded those long legs from the car and circled her sedate rental, shading his eyes and peering in the driver’s side window.

  She noted the gun strapped to his hip. When he tucked his hands into his pockets, rocked back on his heels as if chewing something over, he looked right up at the window where she was standing, and her fingers clutched in the dusty curtains, a shock as intense as a lightning bolt nearly brought her to her knees.

  Even across the distance that separated them, Ellie could make out the intense green of his eyes—the ultimate confirmation that she was looking at the man who had savagely ripped her heart to shreds.

  Not a surprise, really, that he’d followed his father into law enforcement.

  He tilted his head to one side, considering, before striding forward, the motion all raw masculinity, pushing through the door to the flower shop beneath. Ellie cursed as her kneejerk reaction whipped through her—she wished she’d locked it, the better to keep him out. And yet…

  Wouldn’t this be for the best? This man was the reason she had most dreaded coming back to Florence. So she’d get the worst out of the way—no sense in looking over her shoulder the entire time she was here.

  The rationale didn’t stop her heart from pounding out a wicked tattoo that made her blood pound audibly in her ears.

  She couldn’t bring herself to turn away from the window, not even when she heard the heavy footfall on the stairs. The tread was familiar, even after nearly ten years.

  Some memories, she supposed, left such an imprint on the soul that, while they might recede in intensity from time to time, still never really faded.

  As the door at the top of the stairs creaked open, Ellie forced herself to remain still, posed at the window as if she could care less that she was about to see him for the first time since he’d abandoned her. But she couldn’t quite calm the trembling of her limbs as adrenaline, pure and potent, shot through her veins, made her feel ill.

  “Thought that was you.” The voice was straight from her memory, and yet still different—just like the shop, showing how things changed and yet stayed the same. A bit lower, huskier than it had been when they were teenagers. Still sexy enough to smash right on through her carefully constructed walls.

  Ellie forced herself to take a long, calming breath before painting the slightest of sneers on her face as she turned. She was a grown woman now, not a child abandoned by her first love just when she’d needed him the most.

  She was strong. She’d show him how far she’d come, even if it killed her.

  “Gabe.” There was no point in being formal, not when she’d once held this man in her arms, had once welcomed him inside of her body. But despite all that, she was proud that she managed to frost his name with just the right amount of disdain. “I don’t recall inviting you in.”

  Damn it. Damn it. Since she’d gotten the news of her grandmother’s passing, she’d tortured herself with a dozen ways that this first meeting could go, and in all of them she showed him that she’d moved past hurt, and even past hatred, moving right on into indifference—indifference, and not hate, being the ultimate emancipation, after all.

  But with those six little words, she’d shown him—shown herself—that she wasn’t quite there yet. Pressing her lips together to prevent anyt
hing else from slipping out, she crossed her arms over her chest and tried her best to appear as if she couldn’t care less whether he stayed or went.

  “No, you didn’t.” Dominic Gabriel—Gabe to those who knew him well—might now be clean shaven, with a tidy haircut and a police car, but the smirk he cast her way was the same, a flash back to the boy who’d been all too eager to be corrupted by the town’s only bad girl. He tapped the badge pinned to the front of his shirt, the movement making his biceps flex. “But this did.”

  “Even a cop can’t enter a private property without just cause.” Infusing the word cop with just a hint of disdain, Ellie arched her eyebrow and tried to tear her stare away from that rock solid arm. When he caught the direction of her gaze he tilted the corners of his lips up again in an arrogant half smile.

  “When Mrs. Gunderson calls from next door to tell me that someone is sneaking around Estelle’s Blooms and that she and her five cats are terrified, that gives me just cause.” Those eyes of his, so bright even in the dimming light, looked her up, then down before settling on her face with an expression that turned it to stone.

  And damn it, she could feel her nerves sparking to life everywhere his eyes touched.

  “Mrs. Gunderson still lives next door?” Ellie shuddered a bit, remembering the old woman who had been one of the least tolerant of her rebelliousness as a teenager… and that was saying something, since no one in Florence had been particularly tolerant at all. “I would think she’d have recognized me. Since I’ve always posed such a threat to Muffy and Puffy and Buffy.”

  Gabe smiled coldly. “Well, you’ve cleaned right up… on the surface, anyway. No more black hair. No spiked leather, no gothic eyeliner.”

  You used to love my hair, leather and eyeliner. This was what Ellie wanted to say, but the hardness on Gabe’s face stopped her cold. He seemed… angry? With her?

  What on earth did he have to be angry about? He hadn’t been forced from his home, his town… he hadn’t had to struggle through a searing one two punch of loss as a lonely fifteen year old child.