Meant to Be Mine (A Porter Family Novel Book #2)

by Becky Wade

  “Well, this is a nice surprise.”

  His voice brought her to a halt. Slowly, she turned. He was sitting in a suede chair in his dark living room, the TV flickering with an image of two men beating each other up inside a ring. He’d propped his bad leg on an ottoman. An investment-type magazine lay on the side table next to him with his reading glasses on top, as if he’d set both aside when he’d switched off the lights. All in all, a pretty lonely-looking Saturday night for Holley’s best-loved celebrity.

  “If you were on your way to my bedroom, don’t let me stop you.” His sardonic smile reminded her of a hunter observing prey. “I’ll follow you there.”

  “As if.”

  “You didn’t come by for a slumber party?”

  “Of course not.”

  “When you pulled me into your bedroom back in Corvallis, things seemed a little premature. Believe me, I’m more than ready to shut myself into a bedroom with you now.”

  Her knees went limp like Jell-O at the dangerous timbre in his voice. It struck her how alone they were, the two of them, in the dark and private interior of his house. “Once again I’ll remind you that we both agreed to be respectful friends.”

  “I remember you doing a lot of talking after our kiss. My memory is sketchier on what I agreed to.”

  She pulled the cord on a nearby lamp. In response, honeyed light fell from it, burnishing one side of his face. Crossing halfway to him, she hitched up her yellow dolman top, which kept wanting to slide off her shoulder, then set her hands on her hips. “Stand up.”

  His gaze bored into her with piercing force as he stood, gripping his chair’s back to compensate for his ruined leg. He had on a black T-shirt, gray basketball shorts, and an invisible sign across his chest flashing IRRESISTIBLE in neon letters.

  “Empty your pockets.”

  His brows formed a V. “My pockets?”

  “Empty them.”

  “No.”

  “Remember when I asked you ‘what’s that sound’ yesterday? I think I know. Pills?”

  His face lost its humor. “They’re for my leg.”

  “Let me see them.”

  “My prescriptions are none of your business. We’re respectful friends, remember?”

  “I leave Addie in your care all the time, Ty. In order for me to trust you with our daughter, I need to know what you’re taking.” She presented her hand palm up.

  He ignored it.

  “I’ll get the bottle myself if I have to,” she threatened.

  “I’d enjoy it if you tried.”

  “Hand it over.”

  He pushed a hand into a pocket, then flipped a bottle through the air to her.

  She caught it and angled it to the light. “Vicodin.” Frowning, she considered him. “This is a narcotic and also habit forming.”

  “Take it up with my doctor if you don’t like it. He has something called an MD.”

  Whenever she spent time with him during the day, he was entirely too quick-witted and sharp-eyed to make her think him anything other than fully lucid. Even so, she sensed danger in the bottle she held in her hand. She could almost feel it against her palm, the peril these small pills represented for Ty.

  His career had been ripped from him by injury. And goodness knows he could be too daring. Disappointment plus pain plus a careless nature? Not a good combination, especially because Ty had no one to keep close tabs on him. “Are you careful to take exactly the dose prescribed?”

  “Careful enough.”

  “Wrong answer.” She whirled and stalked to his bedroom. It made her mad, the chances he took with himself. The stupid stunts, the bull riding, and all the rest of it. What’s the matter with him?

  His bedroom carpeting muffled her footsteps as she sailed past the bed and into a master bathroom that glistened with polished travertine. She could hear the thud of Ty’s crutches moving fast behind her, following.

  If this prescription had been given to anyone a shade less self-destructive than Ty, she wouldn’t have felt it necessary to take drastic action. She unscrewed the childproof lid and held the bottle above the toilet.

  Ty rushed to a stop in the bathroom’s doorway. “What the—”

  She dumped all the pills in. They made quiet splashing sounds.

  “Why did you do that?” he demanded.

  The empty bottle had his doctor’s contact information on it, so she tucked it into her shorts. “Because Addie loves you.”

  “And you? How do you feel about me?”

  “I . . . care about you.”

  He jerked his chin toward the toilet. “I need those to sleep.”

  “Then allow me to recommend warm milk.”

  “I’d like to see you try to sleep with a shattered knee.”

  “Warm milk and Advil, then. Do you have any more bottles of Vicodin anywhere else?”

  He set his lips in such a way that she knew he did. She slid one bathroom drawer after another open. In the third one she found a second bottle. Unscrew. Dump. Splashy sounds. This time she flushed the toilet and threw the bottle in the trash for good measure.

  Ty glared at her, eyes fiery.

  “I’m going to call your doctor on Monday and give him a piece of my mind. You injured yourself over a month ago, Ty.”

  “You don’t know anything about recovering from this type of injury.”

  “That’s true. However, I do know something about you. You’re a great pretender, but I want you to tell me how you’re really doing. Since the accident. Look into my face and tell me the honest truth.”

  “I’m doing fine.”

  She searched his features, carefully weighing. “You’re struggling.”

  “I will be tonight, since you’ve thrown away my medicine.” He pushed a hand through his hair, leaving tracks. “You do realize I can get a refill tomorrow.”

  “I need you to promise me that you won’t do that.”

  He only stared at her. Time ticked by, and her throat turned dry. She wished she could hug him and apologize and assure him that she was only doing this because someone needed to. Someone, anyone—her, even—needed to watch over him and protect him from himself.

  Silence pulled for so long that she grew certain he had no intention of promising her anything. She’d go home, regroup, and prepare to fight this battle with him again tomorrow.

  He was mostly blocking the doorway, and didn’t move to let her pass. She turned to the side to edge by. As she did, his arms extended so that they trapped her, one on each side, his palms planted against the wall near her head. The crutches fell with a clatter.

  Celia looked into his face, so close she could see the darker blue icicles cutting into the pale blue of his irises. Need coursed through her, mixing with nervousness and determination. She collected her courage. “Promise me you won’t take any more Vicodin.”

  Their profiles hovered just inches apart. Her breath entangled with his. Still, he didn’t speak.

  She licked her lips.

  His gaze followed the motion. Heat and strength radiated from his body.

  “Addie,” she whispered—

  “And you?”

  “Addie and I need you to find a healthy way to come to terms with everything that’s happened to you. For what it’s worth, I have faith in you, Ty.” Quaking inside, she looked straight into his eyes. “This is hard, what you’re going through. But I believe that you can come through it without Vicodin and without going off the deep end. I need you to believe that, too.”

  She could tell by the hardening of his jaw that she’d struck a nerve. Her ability to read him had not failed her. “Now. Please promise me that you won’t take any more Vicodin.”

  “Tell me something first.”

  “Okay.”

  “You said you cared about me. I want to know how much.”

  She never let herself think about the depth of her feelings for him. No way could she tell him what she didn’t know herself . . . at least not without ending her ramblings by taking h
old of his face and kissing him until she had no breath left. He smelled like heaven.

  She ducked below his arm, dodging away from the hand that made a grab for her. “I care about you the way respectful friends care about each other,” she called over her shoulder as she dashed from the room.

  “Celia!” he yelled.

  She ran. Ran and ran, perhaps even leaving his front door gaping. Ty didn’t scare her, but the dark temptation he made her feel terrified her right down to the center of who she was.

  Two a.m. came and went. Then three a.m.

  Ty couldn’t sleep. He read about trading and walked aimlessly through his deserted house. He watched the YouTube clips of his ride on Meteor.

  Finally he dug through a dusty stack of old CDs until he found one with a peeling sticker on its case that read Ty and Celia Got Hitched at the Luv Shack! above their wedding date. He hadn’t viewed the pictures in years. He fed the disc to his computer and very slowly clicked through the eight photographs.

  He and Celia looked like kids—dumb kids. Especially him. They also looked so over-the-top happy together and Celia looked so painfully pretty that after he’d spent long minutes poring over them, he couldn’t bear to look at them anymore, to remember. He ejected the CD and returned it to the bottom of the pile.

  He’d wrecked everything that morning in Vegas. When he’d woken up and found himself in the middle of the wreckage, his decision to try to salvage his relationship with Tawny had been the best choice left to him. Or at least he’d thought so then and for almost six years. Now he wasn’t so sure. He went back to pacing his dark house.

  To his surprise, Advil mostly took care of the ache in his leg. If only it worked as well on the emotional junk that wouldn’t go away.

  He found himself in his big modern kitchen, an empty place no one baked banana muffins in. He opened his pantry and looked at the food on his shelves. He could stick a bag of popcorn in the microwave. But why? It was three a.m. His stomach felt like a stone. His vision had gone blurry with tiredness. He didn’t want food.

  He wanted a small curly-haired woman and his little girl to live here with him. Since he couldn’t have that, he wanted his old life back. But he couldn’t have that, either.

  He ended up planting his forearms on the granite island, interlocking his fingers, and lying his forehead on his wrists. His chest expanded and contracted. How had Celia looked into him and seen what she’d seen tonight? She’d stripped him bare with her words, held a mirror up to him, and left him no place to hide.

  Nobody said things like that to him. Nobody had reason to. His friends and family all thought he was doing well, or well enough, considering. He didn’t understand how she’d known about the things going on inside of him. He didn’t remember giving her any clues. He must have, though, because she’d come tonight. And she’d known.

  “I have faith in you, Ty.”

  Stupid him, because his eyes glazed with wetness at the memory of her saying those words, looking right at him, into him, even. It had undone him. He’d never imagined how much he’d needed to hear her say that.

  He’d given Celia no reason to have faith in him. He found it hard to find enough faith in himself to get through the day most of the time. But he didn’t doubt Celia’s honesty. She’d meant what she’d said. She had faith in him.

  He began to move his lips in almost silent speech. It took a while for him to understand that he was talking to God. He’d doubted and sinned. He’d put himself first. When it had suited him, he’d left his relationship with God by the side of the road.

  As usual when he prayed, his past mistakes crippled him with regret. His injury had kicked him down so much, though, that his choices were pretty much pray or check himself into a psych ward. So he kept on praying. He asked God for help and healing. For rescue. For sleep. For Celia to love him even though she shouldn’t love him and he shouldn’t ask God for something so ridiculous.

  At the end, the prayer brought him around to one final request. “God,” he asked in words that were below hearing except in his mind, “I don’t know who I am anymore. Show me who you are. And show me who I am.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Church had changed since back in the day.

  It was Sunday, the day after her pill-dumping session at Ty’s house, and Celia had followed through on her promise to Meg to attend church. Meg and Bo stood next to her on one side and Addie stood on the other.

  Pounding, thumping, frankly rocking praise music flowed over them. Printed lyrics scrolled down a screen to the right of the stage, but the voices around Celia were singing with such enthusiasm and confidence that it made her think they hardly needed the lyrics. Leading them was a band that included three guitarists, a keyboardist, a drummer, and two singers.

  Where was the choir? The hymnals? The organ? For that matter, where were the pews?

  The churches of Celia’s childhood had looked like churches, with steeples, stained glass, and boring white hallways holding Sunday school classrooms. When Meg and Bo had fetched her and Addie this morning, that’s the kind of place she’d been expecting. Instead, they’d driven to a Christian school in a nearby town, explaining that their church rented out the school’s auditorium on Sundays.

  The song ended and another immediately began, equally powerful and modern. Celia glanced at Addie, who stood motionless, eyes wide. Celia could only imagine what might be going through her mind. At five, Addie wasn’t exactly a veteran of the concert scene. And this worship service, thanks to the darkness bathing the congregation and the illuminated musicians on stage, reminded Celia of a concert.

  Plus, the people around them were dressed more like concertgoers than churchgoers. She and Addie had on dresses and their fanciest pairs of shoes, which put them in a more formal category than anyone else in the place.

  When the music finished, the audience lowered into the rows of auditorium seats. The band exited and a man wearing jeans, chukka boots, and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up walked onto the stage. He looked to Celia like a technical assistant, so she expected him to grab a microphone and duck offstage.

  No. He set his Bible on one of those black music stands, then made a joke about the pro football game scheduled for later in the afternoon.

  This was Meg and Bo’s pastor? He couldn’t have been much past twenty-seven or a pound over a hundred forty-five. Again, Celia had the disorienting feeling of having expected one thing and being served something entirely different. Like ordering oatmeal and receiving an omelet.

  Pastors wore dark suits. They had politician type haircuts and slick edges to them. They spoke in dramatic fashion about sin. Didn’t they? This pastor had a hip and spiky haircut and probably played Xbox with his buddies on the weekends.

  Addie tapped her arm. “Crayons,” she whispered.

  Celia doled out the crayons and paper she’d brought along to entertain Addie. Then she folded her hands in her lap on top of the church bulletin she’d been given and listened.

  Meg and Bo’s pastor was not a particularly skilled orator. He had no holy aura about him. No grand hand gestures or great charisma. But as his sermon sank in, discomfort began to gather in Celia’s breast. Mild at first, then exerting more pressure with every minute that passed. Because . . .

  God was here.

  In this auditorium that had no stained glass. Speaking to her through the words of this Doogie Howser preacher. He was here, and Celia, who had not sensed Him in years—not since that day when she’d knelt and begged Him for a negative result on her pregnancy test—sensed Him now. In a way that was so real and close that it felt as if she’d been pursued into an alley that ended in a brick wall. No way out.

  Her heart rate kicked into a higher gear.

  The pastor did not speak about how Christians should strive to be better than they were. He didn’t try to persuade them into having a quiet time every morning or praying more or signing up to be missionaries in Africa. In fact, he talked nothing at all about what
the congregation could do for God and talked endlessly about what God had done for the congregation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

  He preached grace.

  And then he preached God’s love.

  And then he preached grace some more. “‘To the praise of his glorious grace,’” he read from the Bible, “‘which he has freely given us in the One he loves.’”

  Celia found it increasingly difficult not to squirm. With her thumbnail, she began to push at her cuticles. She’d thought, sarcastically, that she might be struck by lightning for walking through a church’s doors after so many years as a heathen. Well, she felt as if she had been struck by lightning—just not in the way she’d supposed. She felt stricken by the possibility that God might actually love her as much as this pastor seemed to believe He did.

  She thought back on the emptiness she’d long grappled with. When had it begun, this dissatisfying feeling of seeking and hungering after something she could never quite grasp? She could remember it as far back as her childhood, when she’d been forced to move every few years. It had been with her in high school, when she’d hoped that Ty Porter would like her back and make her feel whole. She’d sought to find her anchor in her college degree, and after that in her goal of owning her own coffee shop. She’d looked to fill it with family, but she hardly saw her brother, and her parents were nothing but occasional houseguests. Even Addie, her dearest treasure, the person she’d poured every drop of her love into, had been unable to fill her up.

  The more the pastor spoke, the more her emptiness stirred. It reached out, seeking a love that was unconditional and eternal and big enough to satisfy.

  Her version of Christianity had been about avoiding drinking, lying, curse words, and sex before marriage. Sure, there’d been stories of the cross and the song “Jesus Loves Me.” But what had been the result? Her belief that religion meant trying to do—or not do—stuff in order to please God.

  After that pregnancy test had come back positive, she’d been certain that God had turned His back on her because she hadn’t been good enough. She’d let go of her faith in Him because she’d understood with dull certainty that she’d never be good enough. And she’d grown weary of trying and failing.