by Nicole Helm
“This is called a bathtub,” he said easily, patiently. “By filling it with water, I am making what’s called a bath. You get in it, and you clean yourself.”
“I don’t get it.”
He pushed the plug down, then turned to face her, still crouching next to the tub. His eyebrows drew together. “I’m starting a bath for you.”
She stared, because there were no words for that. None in any human language. Except maybe the one word that eventually escaped her scratchy, tight throat. “Why?”
“Obviously, something shitty went down. So you’re going to sit in a bathtub and relax and tell me about it.”
She eyed him dubiously. “What would ever make you think of doing this?”
He shrugged, moving into a standing position. He unzipped her jacket and pushed it off her shoulders.
It wasn’t seduction or lust. It was completely rote.
“All I know is the random times I pulled my weight around here the last few years and Mel had a breather, this is what she would do. So. Here. Do it.” He placed the jacket on the floor, then gestured for her to lose the rest.
It took a few minutes for her brain to engage. He squirted some shower gel into the steaming hot water and bubbles sprouted up where the column of water poured into the bath.
She didn’t deserve this. It was all wrong. She was a liar now, and an imposter. She was using him and his kindness, and there was nothing noble about it. Not anymore.
But it was warm and steamy in the room, it smelled like soap, and it looked like heaven. Had she ever had something so luxurious as a hot bath and the time to enjoy it? She might as well take it before every kindness offered to her dried to dust. Lord knew she wouldn’t have this again.
She wouldn’t give it back until someone pried it from her hands.
“You’re ridiculously sweet.” There was an edge to her voice when she said it, because she didn’t know how to thank him or be nice to him. All she knew was edge, even as she undressed in front of him while he gathered a washcloth and towels and shampoo.
Girly shampoo at that.
But at the word “sweet,” he laughed—the kind of laugh that meant he didn’t believe it or thought she was joking. “Don’t you forget it, princess.”
“I mean it, dipshit. This is sweet.” She sank into the water. It was almost scalding, but that’s what she needed. She was tired of being cold, and the burn shut her mind up for a few seconds.
He turned off the water, and took a seat on the closed toilet, catty-corner to the tub.
“You’re not going to join me?”
“Nope.”
“You’re just going to sit there and watch like some kind of creeper?”
His mouth quirked up, but it was the only sign he was reacting to anything she said. “Yup.”
“And if I decided to relax by touching myself, you’d still just sit there and watch?” Old habits died hard, and sex was the biggest tool at her disposal. Outside of Rogers property, it always had been.
Finally he glanced at her breasts, even though they were hidden by the fresh swell of bubbles. But he wrenched his gaze away. “Just tell me what happened.” Again his gaze went low into the water before he shook his head. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”
“Nobility doesn’t suit you.”
“Stalling doesn’t suit you.”
She poked at the shower-gel bubbles. Then she drew her knees up to her chin. She flicked a glance at him, sitting there in his dumb dirty jeans and his stupid cowboy boots and his downright idiotic flannel shirt.
He was so handsome it hurt, and she wanted to cry and vomit out all the words. He was just a big, stupid jerk. She considered kicking water at him.
Instead, the truth tumbled out. “They don’t need me.”
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, eyebrows drawing together as he studied her. “What do you mean they don’t need you?” he asked softly.
She let herself sink all the way under the water, and then resurfaced to the same chin-on-knees position, water sliding down her face. “It means what it means. They don’t need me. They have it handled. Steph and Rose. They’re going to solve everything, she said. They don’t need me.” They don’t want me. She wasn’t going to cry…she wasn’t going to.
She hadn’t in the truck. She hadn’t when she’d wanted to push him down the hill. She wasn’t going to cry, because he’d made her a bath and was sitting there asking her what was wrong.
Her sisters didn’t need or want her. The only people in her life who ever had. She was extraneous. In every sense of the word, with every person she’d ever had a relationship with.
She was nothing. She was alone. She might have warm baths and sweet guys not touching her now, but it wouldn’t last. Once Caleb knew the whole truth, his sweetness would be done. His kindness, his friendship, anything that was between them.
Dead. Forever. No take backs this time.
Okay, fuck, she was going to cry like a baby. She pressed her forehead to her knees, and the sobs poured out.
Chapter 18
Delia might have cried a few times in his presence now, but that didn’t mean he knew what to do with her tears. Still, he couldn’t sit idly by. He supposed she needed to get it out, but he couldn’t just watch.
So he sat down next to the tub and rested his hand on her shoulder. He didn’t know what else to do, not with her naked in the tub, surrounded by quickly fading bubbles. So he just rubbed his hand on her shoulder, keeping his gaze on the floor while she cried.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” she said in between sobs.
He almost took his hand off her shoulder. Honest emotion and regret wasn’t something either of them did comfortably. Still, she was upset enough to not be in her right mind, so he kept his hand where it was. “Why are you apologizing to me?”
She mumbled something that sounded like, “you’ll see,” but that didn’t make any sense.
“Delia.” He squeezed her wet, soapy shoulder. “If Rose and Steph are taking care of it, why are you so upset?” Didn’t that mean she was off the hook for all this? “Shouldn’t you be happy?”
She slapped his hand off her shoulder, which was comforting in that it wasn’t tears or apologies. “You don’t get it! She’s still there. She had a bruise on her face, but she told me to go and not come back. Because her and Rose, who I know is in Blue Valley only because of Summer! Summer…” Her hands clenched into fists on top of her knees, and she looked straight ahead.
At least she was getting some of her spark back.
She thumped her fists on her knees. “What am I supposed to do now?”
He hesitated to say anything, because he was pretty sure she would try to cut off his balls. She was naked and soapy. He didn’t stand a chance.
But her fierce gaze moved to his, as if she expected him to answer. As if he had to answer.
“Well… Doesn’t this mean you can do whatever you want?”
Apparently that was the wrong answer, because she lowered her head to her knees again, hugging her legs tight to her chest.
Shit. So… “Look. You’ve…got a place here, for as long as you need. I don’t really have any cash to spare to get you to wherever you’d want to go, but there’s the cabin and—”
“Shut up.”
No, things were never as he expected with Delia. “I’m trying to be nice.”
“I know. Shut up. Stop being nice. Stop…” She shook her head violently and then fisted her hand in his shirt and pulled him over the bathtub wall.
She crushed her mouth to his, and as much as he wanted to pull her out and take her on the bathroom floor, there was something too vulnerable and desperate about her right now for this to be right.
“Damn it, Caleb,” she muttered against his unmoving mouth. “Kiss me back.”
Through a sincerely regretful and great force, he peeled her fingers off his shirt. “I’m trying to be a better man over here.” They couldn’t keep doing this, solving all their problems by ignoring them for sex.
“Why? Why would you want to be the better man when I am naked and wet and begging you to make me forget?”
That was a really good question, and one he could find no answer to. Not in a joke. Not in a truth. He had no words, only a clutching in his chest, foreign and uncomfortable. It was a feeling he usually ignored or hid from, but he had neither of those choices here.
So he stood and held up the towel. “Let’s get you into some clean clothes.”
She gaped at him, but he wasn’t going to relent. Not this time. She needed to be on even ground, and throwing herself at him—while far more enjoyable than it had a right to be—wasn’t doing her any favors.
He was really shitty at doing the right thing for people, but Delia had no one else. He might be the shittiest guardian angel on the face of the planet, but it was better than none.
He hoped.
She finally stepped out of the tub and he wrapped the towel around her shoulders.
“I can’t even get attention naked. I really am pathetic,” she muttered, toweling herself off.
He was pretty sure she meant it as a joke, but it didn’t strike him as one. Maybe because he knew too well the hurt that tinged those words. The feeling you were alone, and no one saw you, and even if they kind of cared, it wasn’t enough to make you feel whole or good.
“Delia.” He didn’t think he was supposed to say this, so maybe that meant he was supposed to. He sucked at this stuff. But she needed…good Lord, she was a woman who needed no matter how much she pretended not to, and maybe that was the veneer that gave him the push he needed.
So he stood in front of her, looked her in the eye, and said words he’d probably only ever said to his sister, and rarely at that. “I care about you.”
Her eyes went wide and her body went still. The seconds ticked by like that, her frozen and him…well, a little frozen himself.
Eventually she gave her head a little shake. “Let’s not—”
“I don’t know what I can do with that.”
“Well, I certainly don’t know either.”
“I didn’t figure you would, which is why I thought I should tell you. Do I want to have sex with you right now? Let’s not be stupid. There’s nothing more I would love than to be inside you, to hear you sigh my name like it’s something special.” Okay, maybe this was getting a little too close to honesty. A guy had his pride. “But maybe just this once we don’t ignore the problem by trying to ride each other into the sunset.”
Her mouth almost almost quirked upward.
“You were expecting something entirely different than what you got today. This thing you’ve been working on so hard got flipped. Take some time to figure out what the next step is.”
Her eyes were dark and inscrutable. For all the ways he thought he could see through her, he couldn’t see through that look. “And what if there’s no next step?”
“There’s always a next step.”
“Now you sound like Summer.”
“No need for insults.” This time he did earn a mouth quirk. He held out a hand. “Come on. You can wear something of mine.”
He stood outside the bathroom, and she stood inside, the threshold between them, separating them. Delia’s gaze remained unreadable, and it was silly that his heart hammered a little harder and his stomach felt empty as he held out his hand to her. Like he was nervous.
What was there to be nervous about? He was going to clothe her and feed her and keep her warm until she figured out that next step. And, yeah, okay, he cared about her. But none of that hinged on some imaginary line separating them or her taking his hand to cross it.
Hand or not, he cared. Hand or not, life was going to separate them eventually.
The empty feeling in his stomach dropped, but he ignored it. What, like this all mattered? People didn’t stick around. Even Mel had left Shaw—the thing she’d once claimed was her. So he might care, but he wasn’t going to believe.
That’d get him knocked in the teeth. He was sure of it.
But he was much less sure when her hand slipped into his and warmth and comfort and…love…bloomed in his chest.
Okay, he might be fucked.
* * *
Delia woke up alone in Caleb’s bed.
Wait. How had this happened? She sat up in the tangle of his blankets and squinted at the clock on his nightstand. It read five fifteen, so likely Caleb was out doing his chores.
How had he slipped out of the room without her waking up? She’d always been a light sleeper, had to be to survive. But last night Caleb had fussed over her and put her in one of his T-shirts, and had not copped one feel.
Asshole.
And…she didn’t remember past him ordering her into bed. Had she just zonked out? Man, she really was in a bad state.
Of course she was. Her sisters didn’t need her, the man who cared about her and was caring for her was about to find out what a mistake he’d made.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Everything in her recoiled at the idea of telling him about the warrant. It was the right thing to do, but…
She didn’t want to do it. She wanted some comfort, a warm bed, and a warm body at night.
Worst of all, she wanted Caleb. She wanted this stupid thing between them to be less stupid than it was. But she couldn’t magically wish a warrant away, like, apparently, Rose and Steph could wish away a sister.
Delia flopped back onto the pillow. She was getting melodramatic and that wouldn’t fix her problem. Nothing will fix your problem, so…
She kicked off the covers. They were warm and soft, and if she didn’t escape them, she’d be tempted to become one with them and never leave. Living in Caleb’s bed couldn’t be that bad, could it?
The floor was cold under her feet, but the air felt like a tropical island compared to the cabin, and Caleb’s old T-shirt felt like silk compared to the dirty jeans she’d been walking around in for days upon days.
This kind of luxury was going to ruin her. She’d never be able to rough it again, and Lord knew she was going to have to rough it. Possibly in jail.
She’d gotten through life by putting one foot in front of the other. She’d survived worse than this and yet, somehow this was scarier because she had nothing to work for: no sisters to rescue, no goal to reach.
She was almost thirty years old and she had nothing. Hell, maybe she should go to jail simply for somewhere to be. Of course, then she’d have no idea what to do when she got out.
She shook her head and forced herself to look at the window, the faint smudge of sunrise visible through the crack in the curtain. She couldn’t keep going in this hopeless circle. She had to figure something out, and until she did, she’d just have to keep the warrant business to herself.
If that was the shitty thing to do, well, she couldn’t help it. She had to protect herself first.
She searched the room for her clothes but couldn’t find them. Maybe they were in the bathroom. But a note balanced on the doorknob stopped her in her tracks.
Your clothes are in the dryer. Help yourself to food in the kitchen.
He’d underlined food three times, and she wanted to be irritated, but…
He cared about her. He admitted he cared about her. How could she ruin that by telling him about the warrant? Maybe if he didn’t have the Tyler thing hanging over his head, she could convince him she was innocent and it wasn’t a big deal.
But that wasn’t going to happen. Even if he believed she was innocent, he wouldn’t risk the police. Not when Shaw was on the line and he’d already risked so much. She grabbed the note and crumpled it. You don’t deserve this. The absolute truth and weight of
that hit her like a blow. She didn’t deserve his kindness. She was using him, just like she’d used all the others.
Maybe it felt different, but that didn’t make it different. Because, once again, all she had to offer was sex. Guys might find that worth it for a while, but it wasn’t worth it in the long run for the hassle that was her.
She had to come up with a plan to get out of here. To find some tiny grasp of control, and not be undone by laundry and food.
Just another thing to survive. The only problem with this survival? Those were all things she desperately, foolishly, deeply wanted.
Don’t deserve it. Keep on moving.
Trying to keep her mind occupied on anything else, she poked around Caleb’s room, looking for some kind of pants or shorts of his she could wear. It was hard when he was this disorganized and they were so differently sized. She found herself sitting at the bottom of his closet, going through a plastic tub of what seemed to be summer clothes. Maybe she could find some shorts.
Instead, she found a little shoe box, so old the brand label had faded away. It would be wrong to snoop, but it was already wrong to be here. She nudged the box open with her index finger, then frowned at the yellowing papers inside. They looked like trash, all in all. Old school papers. A few birthday cards. It took flipping through almost all of them for it to dawn on her what this was.
A collection of positive reinforcement. It was a tiny little stack for someone who’d grown up with so much more than her: a few papers from probably elementary school with good job or great work written across the top; a birthday card with a three on the front, signed Grandma, along with a note that talked about what a good little boy he was.
She had to press a palm to her chest, where pain bloomed so sharp and big she could hardly breathe. She wished she hadn’t put it together, wished she didn’t envy him this tiny world of goodness.
But that’s what it was. A collection of items from when there’d still been a chance. Before they’d been labeled bad, wild, out of control. Before they’d become the kids you kept your kids away from, the kids who stole things, burned things, and caused trouble.