With an indignant huff—mainly just for show—I let her go just long enough to rearrange her so she was lying on my chest once again. “Fine, Violet, you can get some sleep.”
“Thank you.” She giggled against my skin, and I felt my chest grow tight as I pulled her to me and pressed my lips to the crown of her head. Silence enveloped us as the seconds ticked by, but I could tell by her breathing that she wasn’t asleep.
“What are you thinking about so hard?” I asked quietly.
“Huh? Oh, nothing.” She stumbled through her words, obviously having been lost in deep thought.
“Tell me,” I insisted.
A slow exhale passed her lips, blowing across my skin. “I just…want to know you. I want to know everything I can, everything you’re willing to share with me. I want to know about your childhood. I want to know what it was like for you growing up in the foster system,” she said in a rush. “But I don’t want you to feel forced into talking about things you don’t want to talk about. I just wanted you to know that I’m here to listen…whenever you want to talk about it. No pressure.”
My chest rose as I inhaled deeply, holding it for several seconds before releasing it. It wasn’t a topic I liked to talk about. To be honest, rehashing my past made me pretty damn uncomfortable. But I knew it was only a matter of time before I would have to open up to Cassidy and tell her about my life growing up.
I had to clear my throat in order to get the words out. “I don’t have any clue who my parents are,” I started, feeling Cassidy’s form stiffen in my arms. “I was only a couple weeks old when someone found me outside of a hospital in Houston. Whoever my mom was, she just tucked me into a little carrier and stuffed a note down next to me saying she wasn’t ready to be a mother. She just…didn’t want me.”
The firm pressure of Cassidy’s lips against my chest pulled me back into the present. “I bounced from one foster home to another for most of my childhood. If I was lucky, I’d get to spend a year or two in one house before being shipped off to another. Some of the places weren’t so bad, but others…”
“Carson,” Cassidy whispered. “You don’t have to tell me, baby. It’s okay. I understand.”
But I had to finish. There was no going back once I’d opened the lid on all those locked-away emotions. I’d sealed that jar long before and stored it away on the highest shelf in the very back of my mind. I knew the only way to not be swallowed up by the memories was to get to the end.
“I never really understood those people who foster parentless children when they hate kids altogether. I mean, there had to have been easier ways to make a buck than to take in a bunch of strays, right? Those people…the ones only in it for the money? They were the worst. After a while, I learned to tell the difference between the bad and the…well, not so bad, pretty damn quick. For the first ten years, there wasn’t really anything I could do, you know? I was just a little kid. I’d take the beatings, go without food or a shower for a while, basically just bide my time until I moved on to the next house. I got really good at becoming invisible those ten years. It was the only way to keep from getting my ass kicked on a regular basis.”
“Oh, Carson.” I felt the drop of Cassidy’s tears on my flesh and she squeezed me tighter.
“It wasn’t always the adults who made life a living Hell. Sometimes, it was the other kids. If you didn’t learn to defend yourself fast, you were shit outta luck. It was all about survival of the fittest in some of those houses. You had to do what you had to do in order to make it to the next place, all along praying it was better than the Hell-hole before.”
“Y-you were never adopted?” She sniffled.
The memory sliced through me like a white-hot blade as I choked on the words. “Almost…once.”
The mattress shifted as Cassidy slid further up my body. Her beautiful eyes were shining with unshed tears as she reached up and began running her fingers through my hair. “What happened?”
“I guess—” My voice caught and I had to clear it again. I focused on the ceiling fan above me, whirling in slow, lazy circles as I got lost in my past. “I guess the family decided they wanted a little boy without so many issues. They backed out of my adoption and ended up with a kid who didn’t suffer from social anxiety abandonment issues.”
“They were fucking idiots.” The adamancy in her voice caught me off-guard and I blinked back into focus, finding her hovering over me. I hadn’t realized she’d moved again until she spoke. Her hands came up and cupped my cheeks as she focused intently on my eyes. “They were fucking idiots,” she repeated. “They didn’t know what they were missing out on.”
I tried for a smile, but it fell short. “I was kind of a mess back then, Violet.
“I don’t give a shit. They were morons for giving you up. They lost out on having someone as wonderful as you in their lives. That’s their loss.”
I couldn’t not kiss her after that. She was so impassioned, so sincere in what she said that my heart flipped over in my chest. Pulling her to me, I feasted on her mouth, pouring every ounce of what I was feeling for her into that kiss. Once it finally broke minutes later, both of us were breathing heavily. She scooted back down on the bed and took up her place, lying across my chest like it was the most natural thing in the world to be wrapped around me like a security blanket.
I loved it.
“I can’t imagine what you went through, Carson. It must have been so terrifying. But at least you got one good thing out of it.”
“Yeah, and what’s that, baby?”
“Navie,” she whispered into the darkness. “You got Navie. I can’t imagine getting a more special gift than having that girl in your life.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said with a sincere smile that time.
“You protected her. You saved her from having to deal with what you went through, didn’t you?”
“I tried. I really did. Before I met her, I’d learned how to fight; it was necessary in my life. If I moved into a home where the man was an abusive asshole, one or two good punches always ensured I’d be removed and placed somewhere else. But once Navie came along, I couldn’t do that.”
“Because you couldn’t risk leaving her,” Cassidy finished for me, saying the words that hurt to speak, let alone think.
“I wouldn’t do that to her. She was so small, so defenseless. I couldn’t leave her with that bastard. I took the beatings that were originally meant for her. I never once hit back. I hated standing there and taking shit from that prick. He was a fucking bully. To this day, there isn’t anyone I hate more than a bully. They’re the worst kinds of cowards.”
Instantly, Cassidy’s body grew completely rigid. I had no idea what prompted the change in her demeanor, but when I asked, she simply moved up to kiss me.
“You saved her,” she spoke reverently.
“You’re giving me too much credit. I tried my best to shield her from what I could, but there was only so much I could do. She still saw things no little kid should ever have to see.”
I remembered back to the night Navie snuck into my bedroom, tears streaming down her little cheeks as her body shook uncontrollably. That prick had gotten drunk again and had been downstairs beating his wife senseless. It was bad, one of the worst beatings he’d ever doled out, but there was nothing I could do. My hands were tied. I could have stopped him without a problem, but he’d have kicked me out of the house, for sure. She’d picked the wrong time to get up for a drink of water and witnessed the worst of the fight from the top of the stairs.
If there was one thing I could have gone back and changed, it would have been that. I never would have let her see that.
Cassidy sat up and swung her leg over my waist so she was straddling me. “Thank you for telling me,” she spoke softly as she leaned in, pressing her soft lips against mine. Without my coaxing, the kiss grew deeper and deeper until I was hard as stone and she was writhing on top of me.
“Baby,” I stopped her, pulling away just sligh
tly. “I thought you said you needed your rest.”
“Well, right now, I need to make love to my man more than I need sleep,” she answered, leaning over and grabbing a condom from my bedside table.
I slid my hands up her waist until my thumbs gently brushed the swell of her perfect breasts. “Is that right?” I asked, my cock begging to be touched as she moved back, giving herself just enough room to roll the condom down my length.
“That’s right, baby. Now, lie back and let me make you feel good.”
As Cassidy slid herself down, squeezing and clenching as she enveloped me, I groaned at the feel of her wet heat surrounding me and could only think one thing.
I was in love with this girl.
The click-clack of high- heels against the tile of the foyer alerted me that it was one of the very rare times my mother was actually home. Jumping up from my bed, I rushed over to the vanity in the corner of my room, trying to quickly repair the damage done from an entire afternoon of crying.
Seeing Parker with that girl at school every day was nearly unbearable. Reason told me Freya Linden hadn’t done anything to me directly to earn so much of my hatred, but seeing her with Parker every day, the boy I thought I loved, made jealousy flow through my blood, poisoning all rationality.
What was so special about her?
Why had he chosen her over me?
What did she have that I didn’t?
Those were the questions that whirled around inside my head all day long, making me feel even lower than I already did.
“Cassidy,” my mother’s voice called from the stairs, growing closer. I didn’t want her to see me like this. Neither of my parents had a tolerance for crying. My father loved to tell me when I was little that crying was a waste of time; strong people didn’t waste their energy on tears.
Yeah, try explaining that to a seven-year-old who had accidentally ripped the eye off her favorite teddy bear. The only thing I ever learned from those lectures was to never, ever let my parents see me cry.
“Cassidy, are you home? Oh, there you are.”
I gave my cheeks one more swipe, hoping and praying I’d gotten rid of all the tears before spinning around to find my mother standing in the doorway.
“What’s going on? Have you been crying?” Her upper lip curled up like just the feel of that word on her tongue was despicable. “What in the world has you acting so melodramatic?”
That was exactly the reaction I had expected. I thought I’d been safe coming home from school and sobbing into my pillow. Father was at a conference in Seattle and Mother was supposed to have been on another one of her spa vacations in Scottsdale.
“No, I’m not crying,” I lied poorly, sniffling and trying to staunch the flow of the tears threatening to break free. “I just have really bad allergies.”
With a putout sigh and a roll of her eyes, she stepped further into my room, taking a seat on the edge of my bed. “Tell me what happened.”
That sentence from anyone else might have come across as concern. But I knew my mother better than that. She felt it would make her look like a bad mother to all her socialite friends if she wasn’t aware of what was going on in her daughter’s life.
“It’s nothing, really. Just…Parker’s seeing someone else.”
“Honestly, Cassidy,” she huffed, throwing her arms out in frustration. “That’s what has you up here sniveling like a child? A boy? Do you have any pride at all? No woman with an ounce of self-worth would be caught dead crying over a failed relationship.”
“But I love him!” I shouted, no longer able to hold back the waterworks. “I love him, and he’s with somebody else!”
Mother sneered. “This is truly pathetic. A real woman wouldn’t sit around sobbing over some guy. A real woman would be out there doing anything necessary to get him back. Seriously, sometimes I don’t even recognize you. No daughter of mine would ever be such an embarrassment. If you can’t even keep the attention of someone like Parker Owens, I worry what that says about your future.”
Each harsh word was like a knife slicing into me, opening a fresh, throbbing wound with every swing of the blade. It was amazing, really, how in such a short amount of time, my own mother was able to make me feel two inches tall. The sad thing was, she wasn’t even really trying. She had a loaded arsenal of much more hurtful words. Everything she’d just said was child’s play considering some of the other insults she’d hurled my way over the years.
Yet the pain in my chest was more acute than it had been in a very long time. Because back then, I had someone else I could focus my energy into, someone I could lose myself in and forget about all the bad in my life.
But he was gone. He was with Freya. He was happy. And every day, I had to wake up and force myself to crawl out of bed and fake friendships with a group of people who were about as deep as puddles. I hated my life. I hated that Parker had found someone else who could make him smile. I hated my so-called friends. But the alternative was being alone.
That wasn’t an option.
So, despite my conscious screaming at me to stop, I did something I knew I would eventually make me hate myself even more.
I asked my mother for advice.
“What should I do? How do I get him back?”
“It’s quite simple, really,” she answered in a bored tone while inspecting her immaculate manicure. “You do whatever is necessary to get what you want. And you run over anybody standing in the way of you achieving your goal.”
“But—”
In the blink of an eye, Mother was on her feet right in front of me, her hand slicing through the air and coming down on my cheek in a stinging slap that brought a whole new wave of fresh tears to my eyes.
“Stop being so weak,” she hissed, “and start acting like the woman I raised you to be. Ashworth women get what they want, no matter the cost. Never forget that, Cassidy.”
Mother walked to my bedroom door as I stood in shock, immobilized as I held my hand to my burning cheek. She paused just long enough to look over her shoulder and dole out her parting shot.
“Now, stop your whining and clean your face. Some of the women from Junior League will be here for drinks shortly. I won’t tolerate you embarrassing me by looking like a piece of trash.”
Right then and there, I swore to myself that if I ever had a daughter, I would never cause her the pain my own parents caused me.
I would never make her feel as though she were nothing.
Like she was worthless.
Like my parents made me feel.
Jerking awake from my nightmare, my head turned to where Carson lay beside me, still sleeping soundly. Moonlight shown through the windows of his bedroom, lighting everything in a soft, pale white glow just bright enough to outline the beautiful features of his face.
Lifting up a shaky hand, I ran it across the clammy skin of my forehead, trying my best to calm my rapidly beating heart. I knew why I’d been plagued with reminders of my past. I understood that it was my guilty conscious nagging at me.
I was a horrible person.
There was no other way to describe myself. After our first night together, Carson had opened himself up completely, laying bare every single skeleton in his closet.
And I had kept my past locked tightly away behind a reinforced steel door. Carson hated bullies. He’d said exactly that, with so much vehemence I felt the chill down to my bones. Yet I still said nothing.
I was exactly as he described. I was the worst kind of coward.
It reaffirmed what I’d been telling myself all along. I didn’t deserve him.
But I couldn’t let him go. I just couldn’t. What I felt for him was something so different, so much stronger than I’d ever felt for another man. I knew I had to tell him the truth. I just needed to know he wouldn’t turn his back on me. I needed to know he’d listen, and let me explain that the person I was back then wasn’t who I was anymore.
But I couldn’t get rid of that feeling of foreboding that sat he
avily on my chest. It was as if I held my redemption in my hands, watching it slip through my fingers like sand. And I was helpless to stop it.
As the days progressed and our relationship continued on the path we’d set, I struggled with the truth I was keeping from Carson. But instead of being honest, I let myself sink even further into the man I was falling more and more in love with every single day. I basked in the kisses and touches we shared during the days and lost myself in his body every night I was able to sneak away after Willow had gone to bed. It hadn’t been many with Carson still working at the bar, but we made the best out of the alone time we had together.
It had been two weeks of sheer joy, but the underlying tension I carried around with me was beginning to feel like a weight hanging heavily from my neck.
I had just finished canning the last of the strawberry jam I made when I felt Carson’s arms wrap around me from behind. I smiled as his warmth enveloped me.
“Hey, baby. What are you up to?”
God, I’d never get tired of hearing his voice. The deep rumble of it sent a shiver through me every single time.
“About to clean up and get Bug from Mother’s Day Out.” His forehead dropped to my shoulder and he let out an agonized grunt, causing me to turn around in his arms. “What’s wrong?” I asked as I stroked his stubble-covered cheek.
“It’s Navie,” he answered as he stepped back and rested against the island.
“What about her?”
“We got into it yesterday.” His hands came up and roughly rubbed over his face. It was clear he was upset about fighting with Navie, and my heart tore just a little at the tension in his expression.
“What did you guys fight about?”
“She threw a fit when I tried to give her money for her prom dress. She said I already do too much for her as it is, and she refuses to take another dime from me to get her a dress.”
I could understand where Navie was coming from, but I kept that thought to myself. I understood how she sometimes felt like a burden to him, even though he never once saw it that way.
Shrinking Violet (Colors #2) Page 13