Complicated

by Kristen Ashley

  “Greta, sort this guy out,” Hix growled from behind me.

  “Keith, look at me,” I ordered.

  He didn’t look at me.

  He kept his eyes on Hix and stated, “You got ten seconds to move out, motherfucker. You don’t, I’ll move you out, and if I have any problems with you and your deputies, trust me, my lawyers will make mincemeat of you and these pictures will hit every paper from Iowa to Nevada.”

  “Greta,” Hix warned.

  “Keith, look at me.”

  It took him a second before he did, his face held its wrath but then softened a little before he said, “Honey, it’s okay. It’s over. Please come here.”

  “Andy gave me that black eye.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t do that. Don’t cover for him. He may have power here, baby, but he can’t abuse it this way and I’ll see he learns that.”

  “I had Andy for the weekend. It rained.”

  Keith’s frame visibly tightened.

  He knew about Andy and rain.

  “That broken nose, I’m sorry, I hate to share it with you this way, but I had an admirer from the club, he turned out to be a creep and he attacked me in my kitchen. He broke my nose. I got away. I went to Hix. His kids took care of me as he and his deputy arrested the guy and now that guy is serving five years in the Nebraska State Penitentiary. That’s on record so it’d be easy for you to validate, not to mention, it was reported in the local paper. As for the black eye, you’d have to ask Andy. If he remembers, he’ll tell you. But it upset him he did it so I’d rather him not be reminded of it if he’s forgotten.” I licked my lips and hurried on, “Mom lied, Keith. We’ve had some run-ins since she’s come here and she’s upping her game. She’s screwing with me, with Hix, with Andy and now . . . with you.”

  He stared at me.

  “It’s true and I’m sorry,” I carried on. “I’m so, so sorry she fed you those terrible stories but they aren’t true. That picture of me and Hix in the grocery store was the first time he saw me with the black eye. Mom’s seeing the local meth cooker and Hix was worried they’d worked me over. He was a little distressed. But it isn’t what it looks like. He was just really concerned for me.”

  Keith just stared at me some more.

  So I kept explaining. “She . . . well, she clearly has it out for Hix, probably because he arrested her when she was making a scene at Sunnydown, and you know Mom. She’s not a big fan of not getting her way and obviously, pulling her crap and it being a misdemeanor means the local sheriff can intervene and she won’t get her way. So he was already in her sights, us, um . . . being together. But obviously he’s now a target and that’s just . . . that.”

  Keith said nothing and kept staring at me.

  “I’m telling the truth, honey,” I said softly. “And I think you know that. She can get ugly, and you know that as well as me. But lately, she’s ratcheted that up to unprecedented levels as, obviously,” I threw a hand lamely his way, “you’re seeing.”

  It took a second of him staring at me some more before his jaw went hard(er). He looked to the side, lifted his hand like he was going to do what he did when he got frustrated and tear it through his hair. Instead it dropped and his gaze scored through Hix before coming back to me.

  “You got attacked in your kitchen?” Keith asked.

  “I’m okay now.”

  “You got attacked in your kitchen.” It was a statement this time, anger warring with not a small amount of pain I heard threading through it, but also saw on his face.

  I knew that pain.

  He was worried about me. He hated that that happened to me.

  But maybe most of all, he hated that I’d gone to Hix, he’d taken care of it and Keith was hearing about it for the first time now when it had always been Keith who had taken care of things for me.

  “I’m okay,” I whispered.

  He stared at me again, doing it hard, his eyes finally flicking up to Hix before coming back to me.

  “I didn’t take her calls,” he said, sounding calmer, still angry, also, upsettingly, still feeling pain.

  “Keith—” I started.

  “Then she sent the pictures and I took her calls.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

  “You deal with this,” Hixon said close to my ear from behind me. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”

  I turned to him to nod, but he wasn’t looking at me, his eyes were locked on Keith.

  “I’ll be wanting those pictures.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He looked down at me and he was not feeling pain. He was just feeling anger.

  A lot of it.

  “That, Greta,” he jabbed a finger Keith’s way, and from what he said next I knew this movement indicated Keith’s phone and the photos, “is criminal stalking. I want that evidence. I want it in front of the judge. I want that fuckin’ bitch to have a protection order slapped on her so she can’t get near you. And I want this on her record so the next time that woman pulls her nasty shit, I got as much as I can get to land her ass in jail.”

  “I’ll get the photos, baby,” I murmured soothingly.

  He just scowled at me before he looked again to Keith and declared, “I’m just down the hall and I hope you get me when I say I’m gonna be fuckin’ listening.”

  “Darlin’—” I began.

  His gaze sliced down to mine and I shut up.

  He speared Keith with a look then he turned and stalked out, and that was the first I noticed he was wearing a beautiful, tailored, dark-blue suit, a sky-blue shirt and a pair of awesome brown dress shoes, all of it making him look like a linebacker-sized, male model.

  It wasn’t what I’d met him in.

  But it was just as hot.

  Right.

  I absolutely, totally hated my mother.

  Doing this to Keith?

  Then making me miss my dinner with Hix looking that hot?

  I turned to Keith.

  “Janice knows I’m here,” he announced.

  I felt my shoulders fall and my heart lurch.

  Janice, better known as Lawyer Barbie, Keith’s new wife.

  “Keith,” I whispered.

  “She knows why. It was her opinion it was none of my business. Not that she wanted harm to come to you, just that she wanted me to find a way to intervene without me actually doing the intervening. I got in my car to drive to you while she was putting suitcases in hers to leave me.”

  I closed my eyes, opened them and started to him but stopped when he leaned away from my movement.

  “Darlin’.” I was still whispering.

  “She was right to go. Not fair on her. Me coming here to visit you and Andy and not letting her come with me and her knowing exactly why. Me racing here when I thought you were in a bad situation and her knowing exactly why that is too, seein’ as I’m still in love with my ex-wife. And that’s seein’ as I knew, just like Janice knew I knew, that I never should have let her go.”

  My heart didn’t lurch at that.

  It started bleeding.

  “I don’t . . . I honestly don’t know what to say,” I told him.

  He studied me a second before his gaze flicked toward the kitchen then came back to me.

  “And I honestly didn’t think that’s what you would say after I shared that.”

  Oh my God.

  Keith.

  I took a step to him, trying again, “Keith—”

  He took a step back, forcing out a rough, tortured, “Don’t, honey.”

  I stopped and swallowed in order to soothe the burn in my throat.

  But nothing could soothe the burn in my eyes except, maybe, the tears I felt trembling at my lower lashes before I felt them begin to glide down my cheeks.

  He watched me cry then whispered, “Fuck me, I fuckin’ blew it.”

  “Now you don’t, Keith,” I urged huskily.

  “She reminded me of you,” he told me.

  “Stop it,” I whispered.

&nb
sp; “Didn’t even know I was doin’ that shit to her, until she threw it in my face.”

  “Keith, please.”

  “Married my rebound, lost my shot at reconciliation, doin’ that dickin’ around.”

  “I can’t—”

  “I did, didn’t I?” he asked. “If I didn’t move on fast to prove to myself I was right to let you go, get on with my life, draw that line in the sand between us, I could have won you back.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” I shared honestly.

  “Guess it doesn’t,” he bit out, jerking his chin to the kitchen.

  I took another step to him, begging, “Keith, please—”

  “Don’t come closer, Greta,” he warned.

  I stopped again.

  “I see I gotta let you go but I can’t do that to Andy so I’ll go visit him tomorrow and then I’ll leave, but he’s not part of this fucked-up shit so he shouldn’t pay for it. I’ll email you when I’m comin’ to see my guy. But I won’t bother you.”

  I hated that.

  I hated it so much, I didn’t think it was possible, but it made me hate my mother more.

  “Maybe we can someday get to the point where—” I began to attempt to lessen the damage.

  He again didn’t let me finish. “That’s not gonna happen. Not ever.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I shoulda known, I divorced you, you changed your name back to hers. The name a woman you hated gave you, not keepin’ the name of the man who loved you.”

  “I did that for you,” I told him quietly. “For Janice. And for Andy. He shares that name too, Keith.”

  “Right,” he stated dubiously.

  “I did,” I asserted.

  He jerked his head toward the kitchen this time. “You gonna give him a kid?”

  My body locked at being confronted with this version of a familiar refrain, but I forced my lips to push out, “He has kids.”

  “Right,” he clipped that word this time. “Greta gets to spread her abundance of love wide but do it removed so the shit of life can’t deliver another blow that will rip her apart. You orchestrated that good. Well done, baby.”

  Now my heart was aching.

  “Don’t do that.”

  I lost his attention in a way that he was looking beyond me and it made me pivot. When I did, I saw that Hixon was indeed listening, and now he was sharing he didn’t like how the conversation had turned because he was leaning against the newel post of my stairs, arms crossed on his chest, deep in a staredown with Keith.

  Keith ended the staredown by announcing, “Think that’s my cue to get the fuck out.”

  I turned back to Keith to see him sauntering to the door.

  For a split second, I didn’t move.

  Then I found my feet rushing to follow him.

  “Keith, please, God, darlin’, don’t leave it this way.”

  He pulled open the door when I made it to him and he turned to me.

  I halted and froze when he lifted his hand to cup my jaw.

  “Fuck me,” he whispered, his aching eyes roaming my face. “But I blew it.”

  A tear slid into the side of his palm and he didn’t do what he’d done time and again when he’d had a crying Greta on his hands—sweep it away with thumb, fingers or lips.

  It wasn’t his right. Not anymore. He knew it. So did I.

  And even though I’d moved on to something beautiful, that didn’t mean I didn’t feel, right then, like I’d lost him all over again.

  He dropped his hand, shoved through the storm door, strolled across my porch, down my steps, right to his slate-gray Range Rover parked at the curb, his tall, striking body at his command, even if there was a stiffness to the loose agility he usually always carried himself with.

  The storm whooshed closed as I stood in the open door and watched him round the hood of his truck, the lights flashing as he unlocked it.

  I continued standing there as he folded in, started up the truck, the headlights illuminated the street and then he drove away.

  I felt an arm wrap around my chest, another one around my belly, and the hard heat of Hix pressed into my back.

  The tears just kept coming and I didn’t pull my eyes away from the now-empty, dark, peaceful street.

  “Come away from the door,” Hix murmured into my hair.

  I stayed where I was, silently weeping.

  He put slight pressure on, not too much, but stopped when I refused to move.

  “Baby, come inside,” he urged.

  “What makes her this way?” I asked the sleepy street.

  Hix settled in behind me and answered, “I don’t know.”

  “Does she enjoy knowing that she causes this pain?”

  “I wish I had answers for you, but I just don’t, sweetheart.”

  “Now she’s destroyed one young man’s life and two marriages. That young man her son, one of those marriages her daughter’s. How can she even sleep?”

  “Don’t know,” he whispered.

  “I hate her,” I whispered back.

  His arms gave me a squeeze. “I know.”

  “I hate her, Hix,” I decreed, my voice breaking.

  “I know, baby,” he said, and forced me to turn into his arms, but he didn’t move us from the door as he held me close and I sobbed into his sky-blue shirt, standing at the front door to the house that the man I’d just lost forever in a way I never thought I’d lose him had bought for me.

  It took time but I pulled myself together, pulled an arm from around him and shoved it up between us to wipe my face.

  Only then did I tip my head back to look up to him.

  “He’ll email me those pictures,” I told him.

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “Do you think we can still make our reservation?”

  He put a hand to my face and it was Hix’s thumb that drew away the wet still there, one side, then the other, as he answered, “Think I should get you a gin and tonic and we should order a pizza.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll fix my makeup and I wanna go.”

  “Greta—”

  It came out suddenly harsh when I stated, “She won’t beat me.”

  Hix’s thumb stilled on the apple of my cheek and he stared into my eyes.

  “So I have puffy eyes and it’ll take until glass of wine number three for me to wash away a little bit of what just happened so I can maybe taste my steak, but I had romantic dinner date plans with my man and we’re gonna keep those plans. We’re gonna spend too much on dinner. I’m gonna get tipsy. And then we’re gonna come home and I’m gonna fuck your brains out. And she can go fuck herself, living in her nasty world doing nasty shit to people she should treat with respect and love and . . .” I lost the urge to rail on about a woman who didn’t deserve my time or my anger, so I finished, “Fuck her. Just fuck her. I want steak.”

  I didn’t want steak. I was pretty sure if I ate steak, I’d throw up.

  But damn it, I was going to take this licking and keep on ticking, and Tawnee Dare could go jump in a lake.

  “That’s what you want, I’ll call the restaurant and tell them we’re gonna be a little late. It’s Tuesday in McCook County before Thanksgiving and they’re a restaurant where you can’t get out without payin’ at least fifty bucks a plate. They won’t give our table to someone else.”

  “Good,” I bit off.

  He grinned a small, careful grin, dipped in and touched his mouth to mine.

  When he pulled back he murmured, “Go fix your face so we can head out. I’ll make the call while you’re doin’ that.”

  I nodded, got on my toes, brushed my lips to his and when I was rolling back, he let me go.

  I rounded him and headed to the stairs only to stop with my foot on the first step when he called my name.

  “Yes?” I asked, looking back at him.

  “Really like that dress, baby.”

  That bought him a small, not-careful grin before I took my time and maybe swayed my hips
more than normal as I walked up the stairs to go fix my face in order to go out and have a romantic date with my man, county sheriff, father of three, excellent lover, all-around good guy, Hixon Drake.

  One thing Keith had been right about, as heartbreaking and terrible as he’d meant it to be when he’d said it, it made it no less true.

  Landing Hixon Drake was a job well done.

  And I could live with that.

  Easily.

  Hollow

  Hixon

  SHE DIDN’T TAKE her eyes from him, not from the moment Elvan touched his fingers to the keys, not a second as the room suspended, the others melted away, and her lips sang Pink’s “Glitter in the Air” straight at him.

  He’d been wrong. Gum drop wasn’t it.

  He should have been calling her sugar.

  Because he thought it could never get better than that first night.

  But every one since, she’d made better and better.

  And in that moment, sitting at a table with an empty chair across from him, her sparkling water there waiting for her to return, Hix knew the ride he was taking to fall in love was over.

  At the same time it never was and never would be.

  That was what love was, he knew right then.

  An endless night of beauty that didn’t include making plans to retire to your RV.

  Just sitting back and seeing what came next in your never-ending journey of discovery.

  He was in love with Greta Kate Dare.

  It was too bad he couldn’t afford to buy her a twenty-five thousand dollar engagement ring.

  But he’d get her one on their twentieth anniversary.

  Hix walked in through the kitchen door of Greta’s house to see Shaw and Wendy at her island hunched over the books and papers spread all over it, studying. Corinne was nowhere to be seen (probably in the living room on the phone with her new boyfriend, a recent development that didn’t make Hix happy). And Mamie and Greta were bending over pots at the stove.

  They’d started to do this after Thanksgiving, come to her home for dinner, because Greta liked having them all there. He didn’t know exactly why, since she had all of them at his house, except for the fact it was part of who she was, having a bent to take care of people she cared about, and there was something in it for her to do it in her own space. So now, a couple of times in a way Hix knew there’d be more, the kids and Hix came to her.