Seared [Pain & Love 1] (BookStrand Publishing Romance)

by Ashlei D. Hawley

  Reyna glowered at him and pushed her noodles around with her plastic fork. They weren’t that great. She wished Tyler had been able to taste them when they were better prepared. He didn’t seem to mind, though, she thought to herself with some amusement. The noodles and rice had both been devoured already.

  “Or are you beginning to believe me?” Tyler asked slowly as Reyna shook her head in amazement over the man’s ability to eat. Before she could answer, Tyler cleaned his plate and jumped up to grab the other things he wanted to try, leaving her with the echo of his question disrupting her calmer thoughts.

  Reyna scowled and speared a piece of chicken with her flimsy fork more aggressively than she needed to.

  Tyler returned with his pizza and ice cream and Reyna was annoyed with herself because she wanted to laugh at him again. He had an uncanny ability to amuse her with the simplest things.

  “You really are going to get fat,” she told him, attempting to sound exasperated. Tyler smiled widely at her and took another huge bite of his sausage, bacon, ham, and pepperoni topped slice of grease and dough.

  “Would you like some?” he offered and Reyna raised her hands to ward off the dripping mess of calories Tyler held out to her.

  “I tend to eat only one meal at a time, thanks. Silly habit,” Reyna declared in a sarcastic voice that lacked actual bite. “Plus, I actually care whether or not I get fat,” she said pointedly.

  Tyler shrugged and devoured the rest of the slice before turning on the ice cream. “You won’t get fat,” he assured her between bites. “You’re too disciplined for that to happen.”

  Reyna was quiet for a moment. Tyler spoke like he knew her so intimately. He knew her personality, her drives, and what she would or wouldn’t do. There was someone else who’d thought that about her and she’d proved him very, very wrong.

  “I know it disturbs you,” Tyler said. Reyna realized he’d finished his ice cream while she was stewing over how he thought he knew her.

  “No,” Reyna began to respond, but Tyler gave her a look that quelled the words that she’d intended would follow.

  “It does,” he continued. “But I want to ask you why you keep comparing me to someone who hurt you so badly? We’re nothing alike. I don’t deserve it and you only cheat yourself of something valuable by using the comparison to push me away.”

  Reyna chanced a suspicious look around the food court. Strange as it was, she was more horrified for people to overhear the details of her past than the possibility of Tyler’s alien heritage.

  “You don’t have to punish yourself for what happened with him,” Tyler insisted gently.

  Reyna sent him a smoldering glare and pushed jerkily away from the table. “Don’t talk about it,” she snarled before walking away.

  She got to the trash can with her tray and was shoving her refuse inside when Tyler touched her shoulder. And it had to be that shoulder. The tattoo seemed to burn into his fingertips like the barrier of her shirt didn’t exist. She could almost feel the letters of her daughter’s name individually sear her skin, more painfully hot and acidic than when she’d had them inked onto her flesh initially.

  “Judith,” Tyler began, and Reyna turned around and punched him square in the face.

  “Don’t ever say her name,” she shouted before she’d even fully grasped what it was she’d done.

  People were watching, Tyler noticed. They had to get moving, immediately.

  Tyler hadn’t gone down like Reyna had hoped he would as she was throwing the punch. In fact, it seemed she’d barely hurt him. He grabbed her arm with a stern expression on his face and dragged her from the food court. She didn’t fight—she was too surprised that he’d taken a hit like that without even a flinch. She knew she was a girl, but she wasn’t a weakling. She could hit pretty hard.

  While Reyna pondered her ineffectiveness, Tyler hissed at her, “You think we needed a scene like that? Any one of those people could call the police. Social networking could make it viral in an hour or less if someone thought it was interesting enough to put it out there. You think our pursuers won’t be looking at every avenue for finding us?”

  Reyna fought to control her anger, but it was old, strong anger and she was an angry person at her core. She didn’t really care, but struggled to recognize what she’d done as a truly threatening issue.

  Tyler silently fumed further at his mate as they walked to her vehicle. Her fury at him was unfounded and it made everything between them worse, more difficult. Reyna hadn’t answered Tyler’s question about the scene-causing. She frankly assumed the question itself to be hypothetical.

  As soon as they got inside the car, however, he stilled her hand on the key as she put it in the ignition and began to turn it.

  “Not yet,” he ordered. Reyna glowered at him and turned the key, anyway. She could afford to waste some gas idling. It was worth spiting him to her.

  Pulling his hand away from hers, Tyler was equal parts furious and hurt.

  “Well,” he began. “You never answered. Are you really so blinded by your own anger—that in no way should be directed at me, by the way—that you are willing to risk us so brazenly?”

  “I’m still not even sure I’m the one in danger,” Reyna snapped. “Maybe my most dangerous decision is being around you.”

  “Then I guess it’s time,” Tyler decided aloud after sighing. “I hold you to the second part of our deal.” The words left a sickly taste in his mouth. He realized he was worried what he intended to do was just going to make things between them worse. Everything up until that point had. Reyna had made nothing easy on him, and his every effort had been rebuked by his mate, who seemed to simply not want him around.

  But he couldn’t give up on her, he told himself. He’d literally already given up everything else.

  Reyna folded her arms and turned in her seat to face him. “I’m good for my word,” she stated, and the cool tone sounded like it carried yet another warning.

  “I never implied otherwise,” Tyler replied smoothly.

  Reyna didn’t want Tyler to touch her, but she’d spoken true. She didn’t give her word just to break it.

  Tyler held out his fingertips to touch Reyna’s face. He half expected her to swat his hand away, regardless of what she’d said. She didn’t, but he wasn’t heartened by it as he might have been had he not been shot down so many times by her in their brief time together already.

  When he touched her cheek and linked their minds, Tyler was more of himself than he had been since he’d crashed his ship in the rain.

  Tyler remembered clearly as Reyna saw, and he drank deeply of the clarity, re-experiencing the memories offered him. He’d been losing his former self. Now he saw what Reyna was seeing and he felt what he’d been forgetting.

  Reyna saw her life span out before her—and a hundred lives before it. She felt sparks of recognition from the images. A sense of awe overtook her as she realized they were her lives, her many forms, memories returned to her because the centuries old mind of the alien being Tyris, whom she knew as Tyler, remembered and cherished them all. They’d been his only connection to her.

  She saw herself as a slave, struck down in desert sand. So beautiful and young, yet so expendable. She saw solitary lives and lives where she was surrounded by family. There was a green-eyed blond boarding a ship to new worlds, a radiantly auburn-haired beauty in a cottage placed beautifully near a far-stretching blue sea, workers and wives, slaves and even what appeared to be a lady of some standing. The early memories all seemed to have a shine of happiness on them. They were fringed in a golden haze and she saw more examples of love and laughter in them. Later memories had a drift of gray fog around them, and the most recent life was nearly blacked out by a shroud that felt bleak and funereal.

  Though she’d been fascinated by the previous lives, Reyna was not able to avoid looking at the life she was currently living. Hard as she tried, she could not turn away from it. She wondered if Tyler knew what he was doing as she wa
s pulled into her worst memory.

  Chapter Five

  Ronnie was being such an asshole.

  Reyna watched herself fume as she chopped vegetables for dinner, hacking at them like she’d be able to punish her husband for his antics through the mutilation of carrots and potatoes.

  “Don’t let him go,” Reyna told herself in a panicked voice as she approached the younger version that stood at the kitchen counter in their old house. Of course she didn’t respond. This was a memory, not an opportunity to change the past. Even knowing that, Reyna tried anyway.

  “Please go get her yourself. Fuck him and his dinner! Please go. Please go!”

  She tried grabbing the shoulder of her younger body, intending to jerk her around but she had no corporeal body of her own. She was her mind in a memory, not a creature of flesh with the capability to change her own fate.

  The present Reyna wept as her past self sliced a bloody chunk of pork and tossed it into a pan to be seasoned and coated in sauces.

  “He’s going to kill her,” Reyna whispered to the memory. It had no effect, but she said it again, anyway. “He’s going to kill her!”

  The image switched and was suddenly worse. She was in the car with them.

  Perversely, she thanked God that she was in the backseat with Judith and not up front with the bastard she’d been married to. She would have hated to waste one second looking at his face when she could be seeing her daughter’s.

  Judith.

  Reyna cried harder. She still didn’t have a body, and she wanted nothing more than to touch her little girl. She hadn’t even been a year old yet. Her hair was all thick, dark curls like her father’s. Her eyes were a perfect reflection of her mother’s. They weren’t open as Reyna looked at her. She was sleeping as she usually had in the car.

  Judith had been visiting grandparents and Ronnie had gone to pick her up. Reyna remembered worrying because they hadn’t been home yet.

  Ronnie had been drinking. He’d left work late—which was his slang for stopping at a bar after his workday was done. How many times had he driven drunk? Reyna had not and would never know. She only knew that Ronnie had been drinking the one time it had mattered. Judith awoke with a tiny cry and Ronnie muttered from the front seat, “Ah, shut up.”

  Reyna’s heart twisted bitterly in her chest. She thought she couldn’t hate him more. She’d been wrong.

  Judith cried harder and Ronnie turned around to shout, “Shut up!”

  Reyna felt her maternal instincts flare up, though her baby had been gone for so long. Nothing she could do would ever change anything, but she wanted to strike him, hurt him, kill him before he could kill her precious girl.

  The car seat hadn’t been properly buckled. When Ronnie hit the other car head on, Judith’s small and vulnerable body had not been protected as well as it could have. The truck that had crushed the passenger side had killed the girl instantly. The driver of the first car involved and her twelve-year-old passenger—her son—had died as well. Ronnie had survived with minimal injuries.

  Reyna thought she couldn’t feel anymore grief for the situation, but she was wrong again. When the memory was gone, she was so tightly bound with Tyler that she was able to feel his own sorrow linked to hers. He mourned the loss of Judith as though she had been his own.

  When Tyler allowed Reyna to come back to herself, she slapped him as hard as she could.

  “I expected something slightly different,” he admitted as he touched the stinging imprint her hand had left on his cheek.

  Reyna felt hot tears on her face. They gathered under her chin and slid down her neck as she tried futilely to stop the flood from her eyes.

  “You thought I’d be so happy that you finally came to rescue me?” she retorted in a nasty tone. “Well, fuck you, Prince Charming. You’re way too late.”

  “Reyna,” Tyler said softly. “I don’t understand. You saw into my mind. You know the truth as much as I do. You know I could not have come for you sooner.”

  “You came now, when you were still prohibited,” Reyna pointed out. “You could have come sooner.”

  Tyler didn’t have a great argument for that. He could have tried, but it had taken decades in secret to learn how to pilot the ship and make it to Earth. He didn’t have a rebuttal for Reyna, and he felt hollow inside because of it. What he lacked the ability to offer her seemed to be an ever-widening chasm between them.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come here sooner,” Tyler apologized quietly.

  “Damn right you are,” Reyna muttered as she put the car in reverse and backed out of the spot. She was simmering inside, quietly raging, but she was done letting it boil over for the time being.

  They drove in silence until Tyler realized where they were heading. He broke the quiet with extreme misgiving.

  “We can’t go back to your home,” he said.

  “You can’t, maybe,” she retorted dismissively.

  “They could be waiting,” Tyler stressed insistently.

  “That won’t be a problem for you, because I’m dumping your ass off at a bus stop and calling it done.”

  “You can’t,” he began, but she interrupted in a shrill voice.

  “I did what you asked, exactly what you asked! I’m done. There’s nothing else that is going to make me help you with anything beyond this point. I am done.” She stressed the last word with severe finality, and they both suffered over the tears in her eyes and voice.

  “You still don’t believe me?” Tyler asked incredulously. “I showed you everything—I spared nothing. You have gotten the pure truth from me since I crashed in your woods. How can you still deny what I’ve proven to be true?”

  “I do believe you,” Reyna said in what Tyler now knew to be her soft and dangerous voice.

  He nearly shouted in rage and frustration, but he attempted to keep himself calm. His words came out in an angry voice, but it was only slightly raised in volume.

  “Then why don’t you love me?” Tyler demanded.

  Reyna slammed on the brakes, eliciting horn honks from drivers behind her who had to go around. She turned sloppily into a gas station, parked the car, rounded on Tyler, and screamed in his face, “You let my daughter die!”

  Tyler was silent as the accusation seemed to bounce and echo around them.

  “Ronnie let your daughter die,” Tyler corrected in an inflectionless voice. That Reyna held him responsible for the vile man’s tragic deeds carved a hole into his heart that seemed to fill with the bitterest of poisons.

  “And you couldn’t have stopped it,” Reyna snapped back. “It was only two years ago. You fucking crashed anyway—obviously your flying skills didn’t improve much between then and now. You could’ve come sooner and you didn’t and she’s dead and it’s your fault, Tyler, and I hate you for that!”

  Nodding his head once, Tyler unbuckled himself, unlocked his door, and stepped out of the car. He ducked his head back in only to offer the words, “I’m sorry,” before he grabbed his shopping bags, backed away, and closed the door. Reyna watched him walk away and wondered if she hated him so, why did it hurt so badly to watch him leave?

  Reyna drove away when she could no longer see him and returned home just as rain began to fall. She checked around her house, driving by it once to make sure no evidence of people lying in wait would present itself to her. She saw no other cars, no shadowy figures crouching behind her bushes. She wondered if Tyler had gotten out of the rain before she pushed the thought away. He wasn’t her problem.

  Pulling her car into its space in the garage, Reyna dutifully checked the dark corners of the areas in the back to ensure she was alone before closing the door, turning her car off, unlocking it, and unfastening her belt. She sat in the quiet darkness of the garage for a moment, grateful for the heavy clouds that darkened the day and matched her mood.

  Reyna left her car after a few moments of sitting in relative peace and trying—though she failed—to keep her mind blessedly calm and empty. All she c
ould think about was Tyler. All she could feel was the lingering echo of the pain he’d felt that she knew somehow came as close as anyone’s had to matching her own. And what stung her heart the most was how, in the end, to avoid causing her more pain, he’d simply walked away.

  “It’s his fault and I hate him,” Reyna reminded herself as she entered her kitchen and tossed her keys on the breakfast nook. There was still a mess to clean up, she noted. Nothing had been taken care of from dinner the night before.

  As Reyna cleaned dishes and tidied up, she was loath to admit that the tasks which usually comforted her were making her feel more miserable. She cried while she stood at the sink and curled into a ball on the couch when she was done.

  She was in that position for a long while. Her mind was full of the memories she’d seen and the emotional burden the experiences had carried. She didn’t notice the sun sinking down to kiss the far horizon, nor did she realize she hadn’t eaten dinner until her stomach cramped in pain. It was the first indication of time passing that she’d been aware of.

  Standing, Reyna felt the tears had taken everything out of her. Her head was stuffy, her face puffy, and her body was drained and achy. She hadn’t cried so much or so hard since the death of her baby girl.

  Midway through a bowl of cereal, Reyna had almost convinced herself that what she’d been through in the previous twenty-four hours had either been a bad dream or the psychological break she’d always feared would result from living with the agony of Judith’s death. She’d expected that Tyler would come back, she supposed, and when he didn’t, it was easy to begin to believe she’d imagined everything.

  “And why the hell would I want him to come back?” Reyna questioned aloud in an irritated tone as she stood to rinse her leftover milk down the sink.

  Reyna frowned severely at the water swirling down the drain as the cream-colored flow lightened to clear. Her life was like that, she admitted as she watched the clean water on the shiny metal. Anything that came into her life since Judith’s death was rinsed out as quickly and efficiently as possible. Maybe part of the problem was her, she wondered to herself as she shut the water off.