A Year of You

by A. D. Roland

  “He’ll want more. You can’t escape a man like that.”

  “I can. I will. If he doesn’t know how much I have, then he’ll leave me alone.” Ruth Ellen raised her eyebrows skeptically.

  “When December comes, are you staying or are you going back to Atlanta?”

  Mattie went cold inside. It wasn’t something she wanted to think about. Especially not when her body was raw and sore from West, and her thoughts wandered back to the hours spent in bed with him.

  She didn’t want to think about leaving him, not when he spent every moment he could hard against her, loving her body even if he refused to love her. It hurt too much.

  “I don’t know yet.” She stared down at her hands, twisting the heirloom engagement ring around her finger until it hurt. “I guess it really depends on who wants me to stay.”

  “With all the money you’ll have, West would be stupid to let you leave,” Ruth Ellen said with a smirk. Stabbed to the core by the comment, Mattie hated the woman for that moment.

  “West cares about more than money.”

  “I’m sure he does. You’re an attractive woman. If you’re anything like your mother, you let him do anything he wants to that pretty little body of yours and you love it.”

  “Whatever’s between us isn’t about sex,” Mattie said, fighting back tears.

  “Evelyn, I can look in your eyes and see your mother at your age. You and she have more in common than you know.” Ruth Ellen’s eyes blazed and her mouth curled into a half-sneer. “You’re just like me, in some respects. Hidden inside that submissive façade is a ruthless woman.”

  “Did she ever want me? Even for a minute?” Mattie asked, meeting Ruth Ellen’s glare. “Why did she keep Elaine and not me?”

  “She didn’t want you. I wouldn’t have let her keep you even if she had. You were—and would have been—an inconvenience.”

  Mattie’s stomach clenched and she closed her eyes against the cramp. “Did she ever think about me?”

  “Not for a second. Within a year of sending you away, she was married and pregnant with Elaine. Elaine was the one she was meant to have. I bonded with her before she was even born. You were an accident. If I hadn’t been so worried about the stigma an abortion would put on my family, Karen would have gotten rid of you. She was twenty-four when you were born. James had only just begun to talk about marriage.”

  “Who’s my father?”

  Ruth Ellen frowned. “She was with several men at the time you were conceived, so she says.”

  “Is there any chance Mr. McKendrick is my father?” Ruth Ellen laughed.

  “Of course. His chances are equal with four other men, three of which Karen barely knew.”

  Mattie closed her eyes, but her tears traced paths down her cheeks anyway. “She never wanted me at all?”

  “Why do you ask questions that you know the answers to? Evelyn, listen to me. It was nothing personal.” Nothing personal. Mattie took a deep breath, imagining the air she sucked into her lungs pushing down all the hurt. When she had the upper hand on her emotions, she looked back up at her cold-hearted grandmother.

  “My name’s Mattie, Ruth Ellen. I’m not Evelyn. Not anymore.” Her control grew shaky. “West is probably waiting for me downstairs.”

  Ruth Ellen opened her newspaper, dismissing Mattie. In the elevator to the ground level she felt her resolve crumbling, the dams of her emotions springing leaks left and right. When the elevator dinged and the doors slid open with a rush of cold, sanitizer-scented air, she plowed through the family waiting to enter and hurried for the ornate front door. Once she was outside, she stepped to the side of the main walkway and raised her face to the sky.

  It’s nothing personal. She just didn’t want you.

  Mattie breathed deeply, struggling for control of herself once more. I could have handled it better if she hated me. If she couldn’t stand the sight of me, it would be okay. It sank in slowly: the only reason she had been summoned was to avenge an old hurt. There was no mushy-gushy, opened-arms family reunion waiting. Even when the DNA results were revealed that she was a blood relation, she wouldn’t be welcomed.

  The grief wrapped around her heart like a vice, squeezing tighter with every breath. She wanted West and his strong arms, broad shoulders, and kind eyes. Nothing seemed more freeing than blurting out the whole truth. The burden was too much to carry alone.

  You know if you tell him, he’s going to turn against you. He’s not a fan of the whole lying thing.

  Ruth Ellen’s revenge obsession wasn’t going to do anything but get Mattie hurt.

  Not as bad as K might hurt Molly, though.

  West could help. West would figure out a way to escape K, and to keep Molly safe.

  Mattie shook her head and ran her fingers through her hair. No. He’d get mad because she lied, and go right back to hating her.

  The warm fall breeze blew the scent of car exhaust into her face. Somewhere behind her a kid was crying and a woman was arguing with a man. Traffic sped by on the busy road in front of the ornate main gate of the nursing home.

  Mattie glanced at her watch, more than ready to go home. Where was West? He was supposed to be waiting for her.

  He’s probably with Emeline. Why not? It was the perfect opportunity. The plan was to meet back at the facility in an hour. Plenty of time for...whatever went on between those two.

  Shaking, angry, and broken inside, Mattie dug out her cell phone and punched his number in.

  The ring-back tone played in her ear until his answering machine picked up. “Screw you,” she muttered after she hung up.

  The sun beat down on her back. After a few minutes of standing on the curb of the circular drive, she retreated to the benches sheltered by a decorative overhang. Lots of bright tropical flowers bloomed in a riot of color and scents. Mattie snatched a hibiscus blossom off the bush and spun the stem between her fingers.

  She never cared, one way or the other. Mattie felt her breath pinch tight in her chest. “Stop it, stop it!” she ordered herself softly.

  Her mother dumped her on a maid, who hated her. K only used her. West only wanted her because she was available.

  Emeline hated her. Her own grandmother only wanted her around because she could pass as a McKendrick.

  Use me, abuse me, throw me away.

  She wondered if Karen would have rejected her if she had the choice. Maybe if Karen had survived the cancer that had eaten away her brain, Mattie could have convinced her to accept her.

  No, you couldn’t force anyone to feel something they just didn’t. From the stories Emeline told, Karen was as cold-hearted as Ruth Ellen. It ran in the family. Everybody so far was unrealistically, primetime-soap-opera icy.

  She wished there was a place she could just curl up and go to sleep forever. The hibiscus bloom turned into a pulpy piece of tissue between her fingers. Trying to call West again just got her another half-dozen empty rings in her ear.

  An hour later he still hadn’t shown up. It was nearly five in the afternoon. Dusk fell, shading the day in blue and lavender tones. Mattie tried to call him again, for the fifteenth time.

  The voicemail picked up. Mattie reined in the urge to throw the phone. Fine. If he was too busy fooling around with Emeline, then she would just call a cab. A nice receptionist let her use the phone at the front desk. Within ten minutes, a white sedan with a taxi sign on top pulled into the circular loop.

  As she headed for the car, Mattie dialed Emeline’s number. Her sister answered on the third ring, breathless and laughing. Please, please, please let it just be me being insecure. He’s not there. He’s on a job. He’s rehearsing. He’s…

  “Have you seen West?” Mattie asked, hoping against hope Em would say no.

  Her high hopes were dashed when Mattie heard him laughing in the background. The sound conjured her favorite times with him, sprawled out comfortably on a couch or the bed, watching TV, beer in hand.

  “Maybe,” Em purred.

  “Just te
ll him I got my own ride home,” Mattie replied. Em relayed the message, glee in her perky voice. Mattie hung up just as she heard West growl, “Shit!” in the background.

  She slid the phone into her purse, numb from the last blow to her self-confidence. A person could only take so much. Even though she’d spent years conditioning herself to ignore anything that would bring her down, she could only bottle so much up. A second before her hand closed on the door handle, she heard a voice that froze her blood.

  “Hey, baby, need a ride?”

  She turned around and faced the man who’d killed West’s dogs. He drove the same white, windowless van. “No,” she said. Lightheaded from the sudden bolt of terror, she froze.

  Her phone rang. “Answer it,” the guy said cheerfully. Without taking her eyes off the man, she fumbled around in her purse until her fingers closed on the phone. She pulled it out. K’s number scrolled across the display. Her heart dropped to her feet, and her blood ran cold. Clammy sweat soaked her underarms, her back.

  “Hello?” she said quietly into the receiver. The van’s driver waved at the cabbie, and a second later the white car drove away. Mattie stared after the red taillights. “No,” she whispered.

  “Hey, Matilyn,” K said cheerfully. “Get in the van with Logan.”

  “No, K. I don’t want to.” The familiar, suffocating fear she’d felt most of her teen years descended on her again, turning her into a whining, trembling lump of flesh.

  “Get in, Mattie. He’s waiting.”

  “I don’t want him to hurt me.”

  “If you get in and listen to him, he won’t. Not too bad, anyway.”

  Crying, Mattie shook her head wordlessly. Logan stalked over and snatched the phone out of her hand. In the dying light she saw the dull black gleam of metal hidden under his clichéd black sports jacket. In her terrified state, Mattie didn’t hear the quiet things he said to K over the phone.

  He snapped the flip phone closed and stuck it in his pocket. “You’re going to get in the van quietly, or I’m going to throw you in. If I have to do it the hard way, that boyfriend of yours is going to hurt tonight. Maybe even that pretty blonde sister of yours.”

  Instinct spurred Mattie, and she took one lunging step toward the automatic doors. A nurse on the other side looked surprised.

  Before the doors could hiss open, Logan grabbed her by the arm and snatched her back. “No!” she screamed, managing to tear one loud scream out of her throat.

  Logan smacked her once across the face and hauled her toward the back of the van. Mattie fought him as hard as she could.

  Just before he tossed her into the back of the van, at the feet of another man, her gaze met the nurse’s. The woman’s mouth was open in an ‘O’ of shock. One of her slim white hands was poised in front of her, palm out.

  The back doors slammed shut, dumping Mattie into darkness.

  Chapter Fifteen

  After driving for a long time, Logan finally stopped the van. He crawled into the back and eyed Mattie. She clung to the back doors. The other guy hadn’t said a word or done anything except warn her to shut up a couple of times.

  “K wants his money, Mattie,” Logan said.

  “I don’t have it yet. I don’t know how much he thinks he’s getting, but it’s not much. It’s not worth all this!”

  Logan laughed. “He knows about the trust funds, Mattie.”

  “What trust funds?” Logan smacked her again. The hot copper taste of blood flooded her mouth. Both of her lips stung stung.

  “The ones to the tune of fifteen million from your grandparents and your mother, bitch. Don’t play stupid. You got a lot to lose here.”

  Her phone rang. Logan checked the ID. “West? That your man? You know you’ve got K all worked up about him.”

  Mattie’s mouth went dry. Logan hit the ‘reject call’ button, silencing the ring. Barely a minute had passed before it rang again.

  Logan crawled to the back doors. The other man grabbed Mattie’s arms to keep her from bolting when the doors opened. After he’d cleared the bumper, Logan gestured for the other guy to follow. He pulled Mattie out into the night.

  She recognized where they were. It was an industrial area between Daytona and Ormond Beach. Other than a few isolated buildings, there wasn’t much out here. Maybe half a mile up the road, traffic lights swayed in the breeze above an empty intersection. There was a convenience store on that corner, but it was so far away, no one there could hear her scream.

  The nameless guy from the van spun her around so she faced Logan and hooked an arm around her throat while the other looped through her elbows and held her arms tight against his chest.

  She knew what would happen. It had happened many times before. Logan was the first to hit her. Even though she tensed her abs, anticipating it, the blow to her gut knocked the wind out of her. She ended up on her knees, gasping, moaning.

  Logan went down on one knee and grabbed her chin. He made her look at him. “K wants his money, Mattie. We’re just a warning. The next time, it ain’t going to be so pretty. Next time, K might let us have some real fun with you.” He laughed, a lecherous grin on his ugly face and tweaked her right breast, hard enough to hurt. The other man laughed, low and ugly. She sensed him standing behind her, too close.

  She tensed, waiting for the next punch to land. Twice her nose had been broken by K’s goons. Two of her teeth were fake, and she couldn’t remember the number of times her ribs had been broken. Logan lashed out and smacked her hard across the face. The man behind her grabbed her shoulders and kept her from falling over. He caught her hands again so she couldn’t fend off the next few blows to her ribs and belly. Logan finished up with a hard, open-handed smack to the side of her head.

  Dizzy from the pain and the blow to her head, she hunched over her knees, drooling bitter bile into the grass. She bit back her sobs. Crying only made things worse. She knew that from experience.

  Logan grabbed her hair and yanked her upright. “You’ve got a month to get K’s money. He’s being generous. He knows exactly what’s in those accounts, and he wants every damn dime. Do whatever the fuck you have to do to get that money.”

  He yanked a handful of hair out of her head for good measure. Before he walked away, he reared back and kicked her hip. The tip of his shoe struck like a battering ram, knocking her over and finally snatching a scream out of her mouth. She curled up in the thick grass and desperately sucked in air. She couldn’t catch her breath through the waves of agony ratcheting through her body.

  “Car’s coming,” the other guy reported.

  Logan dropped to his knees next to Mattie and rolled her on to her back.

  This is it. He’s going to rape me. She tried to curl back up, but he pushed her knees down and shoved his hand into her pockets. “For a rich chick, you don’t carry much cash.” He waved a five-dollar bill in her face before shoving it into his own pocket.

  Her left hand was hidden under her body. Before he could flip her over to dig in her left pockets, she used the thick grass as leverage and slid her ring off. She hoped it was buried deep enough in the grass so that he wouldn’t find it.

  “You have four weeks to get that money, bitch. Otherwise, there are some people that are going to get hurt. Do you understand?” He waited until she nodded. He told the other guy, “Let’s go.”

  Mattie clenched her eyes shut and waited until the van started up and took off down the road, spinning sharp particles of gravel into her face.

  When the sound of a passing car took the place of the grumble of the van’s engine, she allowed herself to give in to the pain. It carried her away faster than she expected.

  ***

  Feeling old and hollow, West waited in the lobby of the nursing home for word on Mattie. The nurses kept offering him water, sodas, cookies, crackers, but he refused everything. He kept trying to call Mattie’s cell phone. It rang until the voicemail picked up.

  The sweet recorded voice of his angel induced an agonizing pain
so deep in his chest that he wasn’t sure he would make it.

  For the millionth time, yet another sheriff’s deputy asked what time he’d last talked to Mattie.

  “This morning,” he said. “We went to the bookstore, then had lunch, and she needed to come see her grandmother. We were supposed to meet here at five. I was late, and when I finally got here, ya’ll were here.”

  “Has anybody threatened your wife?”

  “Yes. Somebody broke into our house about a week and a half ago and tried to strangle her. I’ve told you all this before. Why aren’t you out looking for her?”

  The deputy’s radio made a garbled sound. He turned away, listening to the dispatcher. After he replied, he turned back to West. “Good news, Mr. West. We found her.”

  Ten minutes later, West nearly took out a couple of meandering deputies as he skidded to a stop on the side of the road behind half a dozen police cars and an ambulance.

  “Mattie!” he yelled before he was even out of the truck. He ran for the ambulance. Sitting on the stretcher, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. The medic tending her let him bound up into the vehicle next to her.

  “Good God, baby, what happened?” She shook her head, refusing to look at him.

  “You were with Emeline.”

  “No, I was at her father’s. She was there.”

  Mattie took a deep breath and winced. Her hand fluttered to her ribs. The medic poked his head in through the open side door. “Ma’am, we’d like to transport you to Ormond Memorial. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to have those ribs x-rayed.”

  “No, I just want to go home,” she replied.

  “No, you’re going to the hospital,” West said firmly. She wasn’t getting out of this one. Her face was a livid watercolor splash of bruises, tearstains, and dirt. She breathed in short, shallow gasps, and her right arm hadn’t moved from its tight, protective brace against her ribs. She held a wad of gauze to her lips with her left hand. The medic lifted the back of the stretcher so it was inclined and helped Mattie lean back slowly. He strapped her down, just a belt across the waist.