Without Words

by Stewart, Delancey

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Discover more Entangled Select Contemporary titles… Marrying the Superhero

  The Negotiator

  Hot for the Fireman

  Love on Tap

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Delancey Stewart. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  2614 South Timberline Road

  Suite 109

  Fort Collins, CO 80525

  Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

  Select Contemporary is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

  Edited by Heidi Shoham

  Cover design by Syd Gill

  Cover art from iStock

  ISBN 978-1-63375-940-4

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition May 2017

  Chapter One

  Rob

  The club was packed. Saturday night, guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I liked it that way. Though crowds weren’t really my thing, if there were enough people focused on their own crap, not too many of them even noticed me. I was part of the scenery, just a voice and a guitar in the corner. Normally, no one bothered me. I could drink and play for a couple of hours, head back home, and feel better in the morning. Some nights, women would lurk around, trying to get me to notice them, but something about my attitude usually put them off before they managed to speak.

  I didn’t generally even bother to look up. I didn’t need the crowd, didn’t want the money—though Trent always paid me the standard night rate and the crowd usually dropped tips onto the stage. But the anonymity and the hum of voices helped me lose myself, lose the chaotic spin inside my head. And that was something I did need.

  But tonight, something was different.

  It started like always. Trent called to let me know the place was busy and the stage was open. He had bands come in, or singer-songwriter types. But if nothing was planned, or someone bailed, Trent would let me know.

  Trent stayed behind the bar on the nights he was there, smiling, chatting, flirting. I watched him sometimes, remembering what it was like to fit in, to interact with other people without a second thought.

  Didn’t matter, though. That wasn’t me. Not anymore.

  Tonight, I set up and started playing, my Jack and Coke on the small table by my side. I tried a few chords, tuned my axe, and started to play. As soon as my fingers connected with the strings, the crowd would fade away. I sang, too, which is funny if you think about it, since I don’t talk much anymore. But when the words are connected to my fingers, to the music, well, that’s different. And that’s why I come.

  To hear the sound of my own voice without hating myself for it.

  To feel the words come naturally, without each one being a fucking struggle.

  To feel human again.

  I rarely even look up when I play. The crowd, the people, they don’t really matter. I need them there, but they’re just a backdrop. I don’t see them as anything more than color and movement around me, like a warm, close shell. But tonight, something shifted for just a second. A little temblor, maybe just a jolt? We get those sometimes. San Diego sits on the Rose Canyon Fault, and earthquakes aren’t uncommon. I looked up to see if anyone else had felt it.

  But when I glanced up, nothing was different. Except that the table to the right of the stage near the bar now held two girls. And one of them might as well have had a neon sign over her head. My attention was that drawn to her. My fingers froze for a second on the strings and I stumbled over the lyrics as I got myself back together.

  What the fuck was that?

  Since the accident, people really didn’t have much of an effect on me. I avoided them, they avoided me. It worked out pretty well that way.

  But the girl with the wavy gold hair and curvy little body had my attention, whether I liked it or not.

  They stayed a while, the two girls. And I managed to watch them without being too obvious and without screwing up again or calling attention to myself. I stuck with the covers I knew well, letting my brain and fingers connect and flow, giving my voice a chance to stretch.

  The girls seemed close, sisters maybe. They laughed and smiled a lot, and the smaller one practically glowed. Her hair was wild, and she talked with her hands, waving them around, touching the other girl on the arm. She bounced on her stool and looked completely at ease in the mass of people around her.

  She shone with clarity. She was happiness and light.

  A little voice inside me told me she looked like hope.

  I told it to go fuck itself and leave me alone.

  I tried to figure out if I’d seen her before. If the jolt I’d felt when she walked in was my fucked-up brain trying to remind me of something I’d forgotten. But the more I watched her, the more I was certain I’d never have forgotten her. I didn’t think I’d be able to forget her now, though a big part of me wished her gone. I already knew what would happen.

  I’d pack up. I’d go home. And after I took Sampson out for a run on the beach, I’d end up lying in bed staring at the ceiling, my dick in my hand. And now I knew exactly what I’d be thinking about.

  Because I sure as hell couldn’t talk to her.

  At one point near the end of my last set, I glanced up and our eyes met.

  Fuck.

  I wanted to play off that she’d caught me staring at her, to look away. But I didn’t. For a few seconds, our gazes locked.

  I don’t know how I kept playing, because the world tilted wildly, like something had broken loose. My heart picked up some crazy staccato rhythm and my cock jumped to attention, throbbing painfully against the seam of my jeans. From zero to hard in one second flat. That was celibacy for you.

  Her eyes were blue. She had a dusting of freckles across her nose and over her bare shoulders. She was wild-looking and gorgeous, like some kind of imaginary woodland nymph.

  And whatever she is, she’s the last thing I need right now.

  I didn’t look at her again. But I could feel her eyes on me as I finished playing. I needed another drink. And then I needed to get the fuck out of here.

  I caught Trent’s attention at the bar, putting my back to the girl and focusing on getting my heart to slow down, letting my blood cool.

  And just when I’d gotten control of myself again, she was right fucking next to me, and my mind went blank. Or most parts of my mind, at least. The parts in charge of caveman stuff—the parts that screamed at me to pick her up, throw her over my shoulder, and find a wall to fuck her against—those parts were workin
g fine.

  Unfortunately.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  I stared at her. I was blank. I reached for a word to give her and my mind was empty. Even the one word she’d said would have been fine. I could have parroted it back to her. But it had fluttered up into the noise and light inside the bar and evaporated. Even that one simple word was out of my reach.

  I watched her expression change. She’d said “hi” like she was extending a bridge, a thin filament I might just be able to risk stepping onto. But as she waited for me to return her greeting, to say fucking anything at all, the bridge dissolved. And her face closed up. The sparkle in her bright eyes faded, and her energy pulled back inside her, leaving me cold again.

  A mixture of fear and surprise replaced the glow on her face, and I felt both guilty and monstrous as I watched what it did to her. She let other words fall between us. Nonsense, really. I’d made her uncomfortable, unhappy. And I already knew she was a girl I never wanted to see unhappy.

  Finally, she turned around and went back to her table, pulled the other girl toward the door, and disappeared into the night beyond.

  And the strange light that had filled the club was extinguished.

  “Doing okay, man?” Trent was in front of me, his dark eyes concerned.

  I nodded. “Done now,” I managed, hating the sound of my voice as I struggled to be heard.

  His easy grin appeared, and he nodded. “Sure, dude. I’ll see you back at home. You slayed it. You always do, man.”

  Trent and I had been friends for years. We’d played soccer together at school, been recruits together when we’d both joined the fire department, and we’d been in the same company at the station. He was the reason I was a firefighter, and the one who’d been there when I’d had the accident. I owed him my life. And he seemed determined to keep saving me, day after day. I’d never be able to pay him back, and my debt to him just kept getting bigger. But in a lot of ways, Trent was my lifeline. And I was just hanging on.

  …

  The condo in Ocean Beach was Trent’s. I’d lived there before the accident, too, so it felt like home. The difference now was that I didn’t pay rent. You needed a job to make rent. Or most people did, anyway. Trent would have been fine—trust funds work that way, I guess.

  But I wasn’t a trust-fund baby. I used to be a firefighter. Now, I was just another unemployed jerk freeloading in San Diego. And something needed to change.

  I unlocked the front door and Sampson bounded down the stairs, flying at me as I stepped inside. One-hundred-and-thirty pounds of fur, paws, and tongue greeted me at the bottom of the stairs, nearly knocking me over.

  “Okay,” I whispered, squatting to wrap my arms around the big dog and bury my face in the soft ruff around his neck. “Okay, boy.” His paws were still on my shoulders and he whined softly into my ear.

  He dropped back down to all fours and danced around as I stood, his tongue lolling out one side of his mouth. He nosed the leash just inside the door, and I pulled it down and clipped it to his collar.

  “Let’s go,” I said, opening the door again.

  Once he was on the leash, Sampson was usually fine, but he was excited tonight and amped up. He pulled at the leash, and I followed him out, barely able to lock the door behind me before he was galloping toward the beach. I hadn’t changed into running shoes, figuring we’d forget the run and just take a leisurely moonlight stroll. But that wasn’t what my dog had in mind.

  We hit the beach at a run, and Sampson moved straight for the water’s edge, finally slowing as his big paws sank into the wet sand. The moon lit the water, making the beach glow where the ocean soaked it. The Pacific looked dark in comparison, almost black as it heaved out toward the horizon.

  No one was around except a few homeless people huddled around a fire down the beach, so I took Sampson off his leash and let him wander and sniff. He circled my legs a few times, then put his nose to the ground and followed the tide out until it disappeared beneath a crashing wave that sent him running back in to jump at my feet again. I couldn’t help but laugh, despite the heaviness that rolled around inside me. He was pure energy and emotion—most of it joy. My dog was so much of what I couldn’t be anymore. I envied him, though I knew I’d be hot as hell living in that fur coat.

  I’d found Sampson as a puppy cowering in the basement of a building where we’d had a call. The place had been gutted by the blaze, and the dog was lucky to survive. No one had stepped forward to claim him, so I’d kept him. He looked like a purebred German Shepherd, but he clearly had Sasquatch genes, because by the time he was two, he was twice the size of most Shepherds I’d seen.

  Once he’d relieved himself and finished stalking the roiling tide, we wandered slowly back to the house.

  Inside, Sampson nosed at my palm until I sat beside him and gave him a good rub. He grunted and chuffed under my hands, his big liquid eyes finding mine often. When I refilled his water and turned to go upstairs, he followed me up. He didn’t always sleep in my room, but it was like he could tell when something was different. And he never let me get too far from him if he thought I needed him.

  Tonight, he dropped in a mountain of fur right beside my bed. I let my hand dangle down as I stared at the ceiling, and he licked it a few times before his quiet snores filled the room.

  Chapter Two

  Dani

  I was up with the sun the morning after our night out, bopping around the house, humming something that had somehow gotten lodged in my head. I had no clue what it was, but the tune was weirdly addictive. I was doing my best to be quiet, but I was too excited. I had that problem a lot. It drove my sister nuts. But today, there was no way she could expect me to be any less than completely excited.

  “Holy shit. Shut. Up.” Amy stood in the doorway to her room like something out of a horror movie—long strands of hair sticking up and swirled around like something had bedded down in it for the night, eyes swollen and red and oh, so angry, and her mouth like a jagged line across her puffy, swollen face. And even still, she was gorgeous.

  “Oops, sorry.” I shrugged and thought about giving her a hug, but she smelled like a combination of booze and grumpy old man. I probably wasn’t a lot better, but I was going out for a run before my day got started, and there was no point cleaning up before I got sweaty.

  Amy stumbled from her doorway, eyes full of murder. “Coffee.” She sleepwalked to the kitchen and grabbed at the pot I’d brewed. Once the mug was in her hand, she turned back to me as she took a long draw.

  “Isn’t that hot?” How the hell did she not burn her tongue?

  “The pain is nothing compared to the sound of you singing Miami Sound Machine at the effing ass crack of dawn.”

  “What?”

  “That song. It’s from like 1985. ‘Turn the Beat Around.’ ” She leaned against the kitchen counter and looked utterly disappointed about my choice in music.

  “Pretty catchy, though.” I picked up my own cup and bumped my shoulder into hers.

  Amy glared at me, though I could see her heart was no longer behind the anger. She wasn’t a morning person, but it made her less stabby quicker if I ignored her early morning ire. She shuffled over to sit on the long forest-green couch against the wall and tried to make her hair lay flat like it usually did. “Nan used to listen to that stuff, I think.”

  I nodded as an image—a memory—came back to me. I was standing on a chair in Nan’s kitchen—this kitchen, stirring something with a wooden spoon. The flowered curtains over the sink fluttered in the breeze, and Nan stood next to me, bouncing to the beat of Gloria Estefan. Now that I thought of it, I could see the huge black boom box on the table in the corner, I could remember her dragging us to the music store to feed her need for peppy baking tunes. She was not a digital grandmother, and she’d clung to CDs until the end of her life. The memory was sweet, but thinking of Nan again sent a bone-deep sadness through me.

  She would have wante
d to see today. To see me open my own shop. To see me use so much of what she’d given me to push my life forward.

  I forced a smile. “Nan had terrible taste in music,” I quipped, playing off the painful memory of the sweet, sarcastic smile, the deep-set blue eyes that never let us get away with a damned thing.

  “I miss her, too,” Amy said. She and Nan always had that no-bullshit thing in common. “She’d be proud of you today.”

  I was not going to cry. I nodded and gritted my teeth to keep my traitorous eyes from welling up.

  “Going for a run?” Amy changed the subject. She knew I was capable of waterworks that would give Niagara Falls a run for its money, and she was smart to stave them off with distraction.

  I nodded. “Wanna come?”

  “Depends,” Amy sipped her coffee. “What will be chasing you?”

  I made a face and stuck out my tongue. “Unwanted poundage. And stress. You should try it, sis.”

  “I have no stress.” She stuck her feet out and propped them up on the coffee table, grabbed the remote and turned on the TV. “But I do have episodes of Arrow to catch up on.” She had no unwanted poundage, either. Somehow, Amy was long and thin while I was little and curvy. Damned genes. “Hey,” Amy said as I paused by the front door.

  “Yeah?”

  “Find it yet?” She grinned at me.

  Excitement filled me. “No, but I will.” This was an old game we played. Nan used to drop little gifts into our pockets, or tuck secret notes into our lunchboxes to be discovered later. Nan was good at biding her time, waiting weeks sometimes for her secret treasures to be found. I’d discovered a ring in my winter coat’s inside pocket almost a year after she’d died, and it had brought me to tears. Nan was all about simple gestures—anything to turn a regular day special. Amy and I had learned a lot from her, including that. What we hadn’t learned was how to remain patient until our gifts were found. We had fallen into the bad habit of prompting each other, unable to contain our own excitement.

  I began rifling through drawers in the kitchen, glancing at Amy to see if her face might tell me I was close. I stepped into the bathroom, stuck my head in the shower, and then did a quick sweep of my room.