I shook my head, really not wanting to bring up why I’d gone out searching for a one-night stand.
“My dress. I wanted to see if it’d pick up the guys like I thought it would,” I lied.
He scoffed. “Honey, you were wearing a skirt, and you had to have known that anything that short, on anyone, would’ve garnered a man’s attention. Now how about you stop lying to me and tell me what you really meant.”
I paused thinking about what to say.
“Being out of prison for me is…hard,” I finally said.
His eyes searched mine.
“Yeah.” He nodded in understanding. “It’s going to continue to be hard.”
I closed my eyes, not liking what I heard.
“I don’t feel like I deserve to be out,” I admitted.
I could feel his eyes as he stared at me.
“Why not?” He asked softly, smoothing a piece of my hair off my forehead.
“I killed four people,” I said, tears immediately rushing to the surface.
“What happened?” He asked.
I closed my eyes. “I had one beer,” I whispered, tears starting to pour from my eyes. “One. And it ruined my life.”
He blinked. “You had one beer? That’s it?”
I nodded. “Just a single Solo cup full.”
“I remember reading the newspaper article. It didn’t say anything about only one beer. It said you were drunk, over the legal alcohol limit. You are a small woman, but you wouldn’t have gotten drunk off of only a single cup full,” he rumbled, sitting up and turning on the light.
I nodded. “I wasn’t drunk at all. In fact, I was barely even buzzed. I used to drink a glass of wine every night back then, so it wasn’t like I had alcohol intolerance. It was just a bad deal,” I whispered.
His face, though, showed his incredulity.
“What did the police report say? What was your blood alcohol level?” He asked, sitting up in the bed and throwing the covers off his lap.
I watched as he walked to the bathroom and flipped on the light before shutting it slightly behind him.
“I never heard what my blood alcohol level was, but then again, I didn’t really care at that point. I’d just killed four people, one of which I graduated with,” I informed him.
I heard the sound of him using the bathroom, and I wondered if he even heard me.
But after I heard the toilet flush, and the sound of him washing his hands, he came out with a worried look on his face.
“If you don’t mind,” he said tentatively, “I’d like to look into your case.”
I shrugged. “That’s fine. I’d always hoped for parole at four years. That was what my lawyer promised me would happen. But I was denied.”
I frowned.
That denial had hurt.
Badly.
I didn’t even know why I was telling him all of this.
He’d asked, and I’d told him things that I hadn’t even told my own mother.
“Who was your lawyer?” He asked.
“A family friend,” I told him instantly.
He frowned. “Was your family friend a good lawyer? You don’t fuck around with something like that. You needed the best. Not someone that would feel obligated to help you.”
“He’s dead now, so I wouldn’t really know. We got what we could afford, which sadly wasn’t much. Not that it matters now since it’s all over,” I whispered, looking down at my hands.
He looked at me like I’d grown a second head.
“It’s not all over,” he rumbled, getting back into bed beside me.
I blinked. “What do you mean? I served my eight years.”
“You’re telling me you don’t lie awake at night and think about how horrible you are?” He asked.
I snapped my mouth shut.
I did do that.
“And you don’t mind the whispers from all the townsfolk?” He continued.
I laid back down on the bed and pressed my face into the pillow.
I didn’t want to talk about this.
“I’m not hearing your answer,” he said knowingly.
I narrowed my eyes into the pillow.
“It’s understandable. I killed four people. What do you want them to do, thank me?” I snapped, turning my head and glaring at him from across the sheets.
Maybe I should go.
Except I couldn’t really leave since I’d left my car an hour away.
Fucking great.
“You can check the fuckin’ attitude, Sawyer, I’m only trying to help. I’ve been in law enforcement since I was eighteen years old; I know a thing or two about laws. And the fact that you killed four people while not being drunk, because they pulled out in front of you, is not something you go to jail for eight years for,” he snapped. “All I’m trying to tell you is it doesn’t make fuckin’ sense. You didn’t even take a plea deal. I can’t figure out why you were even in jail.”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know,” I said, duly chastised.
He placed his rough palm on my cheek. “I’ll look into it…but it wasn’t your fault, from what I remember of the wreck. They had no lights on, and they pulled out in front of you. Trust me, I think something’s missing here, and I’m going to find out what it is.”
I turned my head to run my lips over the palm of his hand. “Thank you, Silas.”
I didn’t really want him to look into anything.
But I could tell by the determination in his eyes that he wasn’t going to let this one rest.
Besides, what could it hurt?
Silas finally plunged the room into darkness, and I closed my eyes in exhaustion.
Mostly because of the way I’d been so well and thoroughly used tonight, but also partially due to the fact that I can’t talk about the past, about what happened without feeling emotionally drained.
God, I hated reliving the past.
And, sadly, I did it every night in my dreams.
Just, hopefully, not this night.
Especially since I felt so safe in the arms that’d just gathered me close.
“Go to sleep,” he rumbled.
I pressed my lips to his hairy chest and kissed him softly before turning to rest my head on his bicep.
His fingers trailed through my hair, and my eyes started to droop.
Then, I was asleep.
My dreams haunted me still, but I had Silas and his badass self there to scare them away this night.
What I didn’t realize, though, was that I’d only given him even more fuel for the determination he felt to find out what exactly had happened.
Although I’d had no idea I did it, apparently I spoke during my nightmares.
***
I woke up to sunlight streaming through the windows.
I rolled around in the bed, startled when I hit the masculine body only inches into my roll.
“Mmmm,” I said, curling up into Silas’ chest.
He hugged me tightly, but just as suddenly, got up to leave.
“Where you going?” I asked around a yawn.
“Gotta go to the office. And you’ll have to come with me now, or I can come back for you at lunchtime,” he mumbled.
I shook my head and opened my eyes, mouth going dry when I saw his bare ass slipping into another pair of tighty whities.
I moaned in sadness, causing him to look over his shoulder and wink at me.
“What?” He asked.
God, he looked so good.
Not one single inch of his body wasn’t in perfect shape.
He had zero fat on him whatsoever.
That should be illegal.
I had fat, so he should have some, too.
“You look good,” I informed him.
He smiled. “Yeah, thanks.”
“Are you okay?” I asked, watching as he slipped jeans up his thick, well defined thighs.
He shook his head.
“Fine. My brain wouldn’t turn off last night, so I didn’t get much sleep.”
“Is this because of what we talked about last night?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Yes and no. Or, at least, it started out about that. Then I couldn’t turn it off, and I started thinking about other things. But did you want to stay or for me to take you to your place?”
“What about my car?” I asked.
“I’ll have it brought to you by this afternoon.”
“I have to be at work at ten,” I said to him, reluctantly getting out of bed and walking naked to the shower.
He didn’t follow me, and I found myself greatly disappointed.
He seemed different today.
More distant.
Not at all like he was yesterday, or even this morning when we went to sleep in each other’s arms in the wee hours of the morning.
I took a long, hot shower, relishing the way the hot water felt over my skin.
I was sore.
My vagina felt like it’d been pounded with a fist.
Silas wasn’t a small man.
In fact, I would say he was on the bigger side of big.
Which explained why my vagina wanted to revolt when I pressed the bar of soap to it and slid it through my legs.
My nipples were just as sore, not because they’d been pounded, but because they’d been pinched.
Wearing a shirt today should prove interesting.
The lace bra that I’d worn last night was definitely not happening.
I’d just have to go home and put on a sports bra for the day.
Although I’d promised myself that I’d never wear one of those torture devices again since that was all I was allowed to wear while in prison, I couldn’t think of anything more comfortable to wear right at that moment.
Especially with the way that even the slightest of water hitting the tips caused a little sting of pain.
I cataloged the rest of my injuries.
Bruises in the shape of fingers ringed each wrist. Hand print bruises spanned each hip. Hickies on my chest.
I looked like I’d been through four rounds…not that I was complaining.
Last night had been just what I needed…all the way up until the retelling of what had happened that horrible night.
I forgot…and I felt again.
Something I’d been needing for going on eight years.
“I set some clothes out on the bed,” I heard Silas rumble from the open doorway.
I looked over at him to see him looking straight at me.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I can put my old ones back on.”
He laughed. “We left them outside, and they’re soaked. It rained last night.”
“It did?” I asked in surprise.
He nodded. “Hard.”
“Okay,” I said, smiling at him through the glass.
He stared at me for long moments, and I let him, pressing my chest up against the slick surface as I leaned my forehead against the glass.
His eyes seemed to darken, but I heard the doorbell, and he growled.
“Hurry, we need to leave in ten,” he ordered before slipping away just as silently as he’d come.
I turned off the water, happy that I would now smell like him, and pulled a towel off the rack beside the shower.
It was as I was drying my sore breasts that I heard it.
A sound that you never, ever want to hear when you’re naked in a man’s house that you barely even know.
“Hey, Silas. I was wondering if you could spare another beer. I’m making a roast today,” my mother, Reba Berry, asked sweetly from the other room.
I froze mid nipple drying, and stared in horror at the wall.
I hadn’t realized that my mother and Silas knew each other.
And well enough for her to ask him for a beer, at that?
Why wouldn’t Silas have said something last night?
I wasn’t a secret.
He had to know I was related to her.
I mean, if she was comfortable enough to come over here like that, than he had to have seen the resemblance between the two of us.
I mean, I looked just like her.
Long black hair, the same birth mark on our necks, in nearly the same place.
Same body type.
She was me, and I was her.
Only thirty years separated our ages.
So I sat on the bed and listened as my mother spoke with Silas about her roast and my father, all the while being livid.
It went on so long, in fact, that I got bored.
And started to look around.
Then I started to clean because, seriously, what was the deal with not throwing the clothes into the hamper?
So while I listened to my mother talk about her rose bushes that were lining the edge of her property, and the way my dad cooked steak last night for dinner, I started to launder Silas’ clothes.
I started with the ones on his floor, picking them up and shoving them into the basket that had all of two things in it. A single sock, and a pair of his underwear.
By the time I was done, the entire thing was filled to the brim.
“Silas, my son tells me you called him the other night when you saw my girl on the side of the road…at the scene of that crash. I wanted to thank you. She really needs all the help she can get,” my mother said, making me freeze in place.
I couldn’t hear Silas’ reply, but I didn’t need to.
Mostly because my mom repeated his answer verbatim.
“Oh, I know you don’t think you did anything, but you did. Dallas said he caught her crying, but decided to leave her alone. He also says there’s been a lot of drinking going on. He finds all of her bottles in the trash the next morning,” my mother said.
He’d been going through my trash?
What the fuck?
And I knew he had to be going through them.
I was the one who’d walked the fucking bags out to the trash can.
He’d have had to physically pull out the bag to know there were bottles in there.
Not like there were a lot of bottles.
Granted, there were some, but not enough to count as excessive.
This time I heard Silas’ reply.
“She’s allowed to drink, Reba. She spent eight years having her life dictated to her. Let her live her life without you all second guessing every single thing she does,” Silas reprimanded her gently.
Then I heard the distinct sound of Silas’ screen door opening.
Last night I’d remembered the grating screech, and I wondered how I’d not heard it when my mother had entered.
I heard the two of them talking more from the front porch and decided to go ahead and get dressed in the clothes he’d left me.
They looked new.
And in style.
All of my clothes were still what I wore in high school. Which meant I had a lot of things that probably wouldn’t ever be acceptable on a twenty nine year old.
I wore them anyway, though.
Not like I had much choice.
Maybe I should make a stop by the Goodwill later.
They would surely have something better than what I had.
Like the pants and shirt he’d left me draped over the edge of the bed.
I picked through them, seeing that there were no bra or panties.
So I did what any normal woman would do.
Went to Silas’ dresser drawers and pulled every single one of them open until I found the underwear.
I laughed when I saw how high up they came on my belly, giggling as quietly as I could as I slipped my feet into the jeans.
The pants fit a little loosely in the waist, but fit perfectly everywhere else.
The shirt fit everywhere but the boob area, but I didn’t think that mattered as much as it could have since it was just a simple red, fitted t-shirt.
The only thin
g that was wrong with it was the fact that I had no bra to cover up my nipples.
And the tightness over the breast area was accentuating that fact.
“It fits,” Silas rumbled from the doorway, causing me to jump and turn.
I had to smile when Silas’ eyes automatically went to my breasts.
Such a typical man.
“How are you getting past that creaky porch door?” I asked, tugging my shirt down to cover my belly.
He smiled.
“Magic,” he answered, starting to walk towards me.
“So you know my mom,” I accused.
He nodded. “Yep.”
“You knew who I was the entire time?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yep.”
He wasn’t ashamed that he hadn’t told me at all. He just said ‘yep’ like it wasn’t that big of a deal.
“She seemed friendly with you…do you hang out with my dad and mom a lot?” I asked.
His eyes widened slightly.
“Not your dad, no,” he said. “Are you ready to go?”
I wondered what he meant by ‘not your dad,’ but he was gone before I could ask him.
So I followed him, shoeless, and came to a stop when I got to the living room.
“Wow,” I said in awe. “This is nice.”
The living room, kitchen, dining room, and what looked to be a study were all one huge, open space.
The walls were what looked like real tree logs stripped of the bark, and the ceilings had huge beams running along the rafters.
There was a large, brown leather couch in the middle of the room, facing what had to be the largest TV screen I’d ever seen.
And the kitchen was to die for.
Beautiful mahogany cabinets with black granite counter tops rounded off the living space with their simple but elegant addition to the large space.
All of it made me smile at the man who resembled that description to a T. Simple but elegant.
Silas was standing at the kitchen sink, putting water into a bottle.
My mouth went dry when I saw the look he aimed at me over his shoulder.
Sex and hunger.
Geez.
I took a step back, and his eyes changed, going to curious.
“Yeah, I put a lot of time and effort into this place,” he said, screwing the lid down tight onto his bottle and making his way toward me.
He grabbed a hold of my hand on the way, walking and talking.
Counter To My Intelligence (The Heroes of The Dixie Wardens MC Book 7) Page 8