Serve and Protect (Heroes of Evers, Texas #3)

by Lori Ryan

  Garret nodded and took a step closer to her.

  “I get that.”

  She looked thrown. Confused. She opened her mouth as though she wanted to keep arguing, to keep pushing him away, but he didn’t let her. He ran his hands down the backs of her arms and tugged her to him when his fingers hit hers. “I get it, Ashley. I get it and I still think you’re a good person. I still think it wasn’t your fault. I still think you didn’t kill your baby. You’re not responsible for that. You couldn’t protect your baby any more than you could protect yourself back then.”

  “No.” She shook her head almost as violently as her hands were trembling. “No…I…you don’t understand. He didn’t discover the pregnancy that night. It wasn’t like I gained enough weight to show and he discovered it. He was too drunk most of the time to know. I told him. I waited for him to come to me that night and I told him. I—”

  He didn’t let her finish. He finished for her. “You, Ashley, are a good person. You are a beautiful, strong, incredible person. Nothing that was done to you back then, and none of the choices and decisions you made as a result, can change that. You’re a good person.”

  He could see the slight sheen of tears threatening to fall, but she shook her head again, as though she could will them back. But he was also starting to see the veneer crack. He could see the adult Ashley pushing her way through. The one who knew in her head and her heart that she couldn’t be blamed for what happened all that time ago. For what happened to her when she was really no more than a child.

  “Don’t do this,” she whispered, the plea in her voice bringing the anguish in his heart to a full boil. But he wouldn’t walk away from her now. She needed to hear this, needed to face it.

  He squeezed her hands in his and kept going, knocking down the final wall she’d been clinging to. “I get it. You think it would be easier if I hated you. If I walked away. Because that would be less scary than this. I get that. But nothing you say, nothing you tell me, will make me hate you. What he did to you had nothing to do with you. It was him, Ashley. All him. He raped you. He killed your baby. The fact that you liked the attention, even wanted some of it to continue—the fact that you stayed—doesn’t change that. It doesn’t put any of it on you.”

  Her body went beyond trembling. She was shaking violently now, as though a battle was going on inside her. But it was a battle against herself. Something had to die inside of her to end the battle. He only hoped it was the guilt that fourteen-year-old girl was carrying around. Not the Ashley he knew. Not the Ashley he wanted to know better.

  18

  Ashley cried for what seemed like hours, her throat aching, her chest heaving in uncontrollable bursts. Garrett had brought her to the couch and sat with her, holding her in his strong arms the entire time. He didn’t seem to care that her nose was running all over his shirt. When her jagged breaths slowed, she waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. He seemed to have no judgment. He simply held her. Just as she had held her baby so many years earlier.

  “I held her for hours. He left the house and Tanya hadn’t come home that night. I sat on the floor of the bathroom and held my baby for hours. She was so tiny. She fit right in my hands and weighed nothing, Garret, nothing.” She cupped her hands together and looked at them. She had never been able to get rid of the sensation of holding that tiny weightless baby in her hands. It would sneak up on her at times, along with the doubts, the gnawing fear that she would never be a good enough person after what she’d done.

  “I won’t ever be good enough.”

  “Good enough for what?” His voice was gruff, but calm.

  Ashley frowned. “I don’t know. Even though I love my family and I know they love me, I think I’ve always had this feeling that I don’t deserve them.”

  Garret was quiet and Ashley didn’t speak again for a long time, either. When she did, her voice shook. “If I had told Alice what happened back then, she wouldn’t be dead now.”

  Garret pulled back and turned her to face him, hands on her shoulders. “No, Ashley. You can’t blame yourself for the decisions you made as a fourteen-year-old put in a horrific situation. Hell, I’ll get you the science if you need it, on the underdeveloped mind of a teen and the inability of a child that age to make these kinds of decisions. But believe me, you are not responsible for this. Bill Franks is responsible for his actions. He’s responsible for what he did to you, for what he did to your baby, and for what he did to Alice. Him. No one else.”

  Ashley nodded, but didn’t say anything. She didn’t know if she could let go of the feelings of guilt so easily. Her head said to believe what Garret was telling her, but her heart said otherwise. And now she had a new measure of guilt to stack on top of the rest. Because she knew Garret wanted more than simply a witness for his case or even a friend. She wasn’t an idiot. His interest in something more came through loud and clear.

  Her body was interested in that, too. But her head was so screwed up she didn’t know if she could offer him anything. She sure as hell didn’t know how to explain that, although she’d used sex to seek out intimacy with boys when she was a teen, she’d realized at some point that wasn’t going to get her what she wanted. It wouldn’t get her a real relationship with a man. Sex wasn’t the answer for her as a teen any more than it had been the way to find a family who loved her when she lived in the Franks’ house. Sex created illusions of relationships, but underneath, there were only smoke and mirrors.

  And when Ashley had realized that, she’d stopped using sex for anything at all. How could she tell Garret it had been almost eight years since she’d been naked with someone of the opposite sex? She dreamed about the fantasy of a loving, intimate relationship with a man like Garret. In fact, she’d built a writing career based on those fantasies, that illusive dream. But that didn’t mean she ever thought she was capable of attaining that. She’d never once come close to having the sort of relationships she wrote about. In fact, she might as well be writing science fiction. Her stories were as fantastical to her as a trip to Mars or a time-traveling doctor.

  As if reading the truth on her face, Garrett kissed her temple and pulled her into his arms for a hug. He was letting her off the hook, she realized. Part of her was relieved. But underneath, a small part of her felt the loss of what could be with this man. If only she could be brave enough to go for it. The only trouble was, Ashley wasn’t feeling up to any more bravery right now. She wanted to hide and lick her wounds and figure out how to move forward in her life from here.

  *

  “I’m going to get you a better lawyer,” Michelle said into the phone, looking into the eyes of the man she loved. A man she knew could never do the things they said he’d done. She knew for a fact he hadn’t done what they thought he had.

  “Oh yeah,” Bill said, eyes flat. “How you plan to do that, little miss thing? You got money I don’t know about somewhere? Because lawyers cost money.”

  Michelle put her hand to the glass, but Bill didn’t raise his in response. His gaze looked through her, as if she was useless to him. But she wasn’t. She would show him.

  She raised her chin. “I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I’ll find a way to pay for one for you. Those public defenders are useless, you know. But I’ll take care of things for you, Bill. I’ll find a way.”

  His eyes swung to her now, but that familiar hardness she’d seen in him from time to time was there. The hardness he got when he was angry. When she’d done something wrong. “You know what you can do for me, Chelle?”

  He used her pet name, but it wasn’t said with any tenderness, and she swallowed hard. She reminded herself he was going through something extremely difficult right now. He wouldn’t ever admit it to her, but she knew he had to be scared. She’d always heard child molesters didn’t do well in prison, and the split lip and bandage across his nose told her he wasn’t faring well in there. The injustice of it ate at her. To be falsely accused of something so horrific was awful.

&nbs
p; They were railroading him. The damned social workers who had come to take Evie didn’t want to listen to a word she said. She told them over and over he wasn’t interested in kids. He’d never so much as peeked at Evie. Hell, just before they’d come to the house with that fucking warrant, Michelle had been bent over the kitchen table lifting her skirt for him. He wanted her, not a damned kid.

  “Anything, Billy. Tell me what to do.”

  He looked around and then turned back to her, cradling the phone tight to his ear. He bent toward the glass and lowered his voice. “If that girl wasn’t around, I wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s her. It’s all her.”

  Michelle didn’t understand. What girl? He couldn’t mean Evie. “Who?”

  He mumbled something about not leaving loose ends years ago. Then he tapped the phone receiver against the glass before lifting it back to his ear again. “You take care of that Walker girl, you hear me? You want to help me? That’s the way to do it. She needs to disappear, you hear me? Huh?”

  She sat motionless for a minute, before looking around nervously. “I—I don’t know, Billy.”

  He slammed the receiver back into its cradle, drawing the two guards at either end of the room forward. He pointed at the glass and said something, but the words were lost behind the thick separation.

  She called out to him not to go, but the guards had stepped forward, speaking words she couldn’t hear. Clearly demands, from the looks of it. Billy turned with a glare her way before walking toward a door, flanked by officers.

  “I’ll take care of it, Billy,” she called through the glass, garnering a glare from the uniformed guard on her side of the partition. She ducked her head and tucked her purse in against her side, hugging it with one arm as she walked toward the door. She’d figure something out. She didn’t know what, but Billy was counting on her and she wasn’t about to let him down.

  19

  Two days after what Ashley now thought of as “the big breakdown,” Garret knocked on her door with a tiny bouquet in his hands. Not a giant bouquet of dozens of roses you sometimes read about in billionaire romance novels. Not even a grocery-store bouquet of carnations and lilies. It was a little posy of what looked like peonies and wildflowers, and even some branches and leaves. And it was somehow better than anything Ashley could have come up with herself.

  He smiled and passed it over to her. “For you.”

  Ashley suddenly didn’t feel the embarrassment she was sure she’d feel when seeing him for the first time after her meltdown. She took the flowers and smiled as she led him to the kitchen.

  “Thank you. Did you pick them yourself?” She smothered a laugh as she pulled out a small glass jar and placed the flowers in it before filling it with water from the tap. “They’re beautiful.”

  “Thanks. And yes, I did.” He sounded smug, like he’d accomplished some great feat. It made her giggle. “Are you laughing at me, Ashley Walker?”

  She grinned at him. “Sorry. It’s just the image of you picking flowers is a little—” She stopped to think before continuing. “Incongruent.”

  Now he laughed. “Yeah, well, maybe it wasn’t all me. I live in an apartment next to this little house with the sweetest lady next door. She’s about eighty-one or eighty-two now, I think. But she’s out gardening every day. I stopped to talk to her and mentioned I was going to get you some flowers. I asked her what I should get you and she made me come in her garden with her and pick them. The leaves were all me, though,” he said, pointing to the branches that stuck out between the peonies. “I thought it added a touch of manliness to the whole thing.”

  His smile was teasing and she laughed at the look on his face. He was really and truly proud of his manly bouquet. And she had to admit, she was a little bit, too. It showed he cared about what he gave her. That he wanted to bring her something pretty, something that would put a smile on her face. It ended up doing more than that. Her heart jumped a little bit and she began to feel hopeful that maybe, just maybe, she could open up to this man. Let her guard down enough to let him inside and see what happened.

  Garret smiled at the glass jar and tapped it with his finger. “Alice did that, too. Used glass jars for flowers and chipped coffee mugs to hold her pennies on the kitchen table.”

  Ashley looked at him. “You knew Alice?”

  He nodded, his eyes sad. “Yeah.” He ran a hand over his jaw and gave her a look. “Listen, my captain doesn’t know. I need you to keep that to yourself so I can stay on this case.”

  Now it was Ashley’s turn to nod. “How did you know her?”

  He pulled out a stool and sat at the kitchen island, then watched as Ashley did the same. She watched him, but didn’t seem to be judging him. He hoped like hell he was doing the right thing by telling her this.

  “I grew up in the apartment down the hall from her.” He stopped and waited, but she didn’t say anything. “My mom tried really hard. She wasn’t going to win any medals for mom of the year, but she really tried. I had clothes, food, a few toys and things. I had what I needed. And she loved me. She just wasn’t around a lot.”

  Garret felt like an ass, saying anything critical about his upbringing after what Ashley had been through, but he plugged on. “My mom had no education. She dropped out of high school to have me, and honestly, before that I think she failed just about everything. She just wasn’t interested in learning. But then she had me and she needed to work two or three minimum-wage jobs at a time to take care of us. To make sure we lived in a place where I was safe. It wasn’t the best neighborhood, but it wasn’t the worst.”

  Ashley smiled at him. “It sounds like she loved you.”

  He felt himself smiling at the memory of his mom. “She did in her own way. She just, hell, I don’t know how to describe it. She was just tired, I think. I mean, yeah, she was tired from working three jobs, but I think she was also very tired of life in general. Her parents disowned her when she had me. My dad took off well before I was born. I still don’t know much about him other than I have his name, and I guess it doesn’t matter. He obviously had no interest in me. I think my mom was just pretty tired of the whole world. Of the way things had gone for her.”

  “Where is she now?” Ashley asked.

  “She died when I was nineteen. She had a heart attack.” He could still hear the shock in his own voice. “At thirty-five, after working herself to the bone all my life, hell, all her life. She just died one day. Her heart just stopped.”

  Garret looked down and found his hands in Ashley’s, her thumbs rubbing circles over his fingers. “I’m so sorry, Garret.”

  He nodded. “It’s still a shock all this time later.”

  He paused for a long time, just thinking about his mom. She had been a good woman. She just hadn’t been the one to teach him that it was okay to reach for things in life. To teach him to want more out of life.

  “Alice was there for me through it, just like she’d been there for me all my life.” His voice was gruff now with the memories. Memories of two women who had meant the world to him, but were now gone. “She always brought me a little snack for after dinner. Or she’d have me over for lemonade and ask me about my day. My mom and I didn’t have those talks. If she wasn’t working, she was sleeping. She’d leave me dinner on a plate in the oven or money to buy pizza. Alice was the one who would make me eat a piece of fruit or a vegetable here or there. Like she was supplementing my upbringing.”

  Ashley laughed. “That sounds like Alice. She couldn’t ignore anyone that needed her. If she thought she could help, she would. And if she didn’t think she could help, she’d find someone who could.”

  Garret smiled at her and squeezed her hands. “I wouldn’t be a cop if not for Alice. She was the one who taught me I could reach for more than my mom had. She taught me to look at the world and see what was out there that I could strive for. My mom never did that. Not for me and not for herself. She just wanted to get by. I don’t think it ever occurred to her to want more. But Alice always
told me I could be whatever I wanted to be.”

  They sat for a long time talking about their memories of Alice. Ashley told him how Alice had been her only caseworker, which wasn’t always the case for kids in the system. Kids often got shuffled around, or caseworkers burned out and moved on. Not Alice. Once you were hers, you were hers for life, if she had anything to say about it.

  Ashley had met her soon after her mom had left her at a playground when she was seven. Even at the young age of seven, she had been angry and defensive, telling the world—and Alice—she didn’t need anyone to take care of her. “I got this,” she used to say. “I got this.” Like she was old enough to see to her own needs. And Alice had smiled and told her she’d just help out then. Give a little support here and there when Ashley needed it.

  Ashley and Garret moved through the week in much the same way, telling each other stories. The stories that defined them. She learned a little more about his parents. His father had come over as a teenager on his own from Ireland. When he and Garret’s mother met, they thought it was very Romeo and Juliet of them to date, given his Irish roots and her British heritage, even though his mother had never set foot in England. In fact, she’d never set foot outside of Texas. His dad stuck around long enough to get his mom pregnant, before leaving her alone and heartbroken.

  Ashley didn’t have even a scrap of information on her biological father. Her mother had been too wasted to talk to her about much, right up until the moment she abandoned her. She used to fantasize that he would show up and take her away. Take her home after explaining the huge mix-up at the hospital when she was born or that he’d been lost at sea and couldn’t get back to her. Little wonder she ended up as a writer years later. She’d been weaving stories for a long time.

  Ashley smiled at Garret as they left her parents’ house a week later. He’d taken her to dinner twice that week, but hadn’t pushed for anything more than a kiss goodnight at her door. Somehow, though, his kisses started a burning inside she hadn’t expected from such slight contact of his mouth on hers.