The Ground Beneath (You and Me Book 1)

by Stephanie Vercier

  “You really thought that?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I don’t know, Alli. Maybe… and I’m sorry. I’m sorry if I doubted you.”

  Instead of allowing myself to be hurt by his admission, I try to be just as honest. “For a second, I thought it was you with Theresa. I mean, you just seemed kind of funny around her earlier and, well, even though I knew it couldn’t be, I still felt that fear.”

  “It wasn’t me,” he says, his voice choked with emotion as he pulls me close to him. “I love you, Alli. I love you so much that the thought of losing you scares me more than anything.”

  “You won’t lose me,” I assure him, deep in his embrace. “I love you too.”

  “Promise me,” he says, his voice low but insistent. “Promise me you won’t ever leave me.”

  It’s a dangerous promise to make, a pledge I could be forced to break one day. But I can’t bear the hurt in his voice or even the thought of something so bad happening between us one day that I’d have to leave him.

  Without further trepidation, I say, “I promise, Hunter. I promise I’ll never leave you.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  HUNTER

  I hadn’t even wanted to go to the party last week, knowing I’d have to be in relatively close proximity to Theresa. But I had to be there to support Alli, even if I felt like crap for not telling her I used to have sex with the woman she’d been tasked with throwing a lavish party for.

  I’d done my damndest to keep things cool, but I had trouble looking Alli in the eye when Theresa made her presence known. And then she’d pulled me off with her, telling me she had this big surprise she was going to spring on everyone at the stroke of midnight. She made cryptic allusions to it having the potential to “destroy relationships,” and I finally asked her to cut the crap and tell me what she was planning.

  “You don’t have to worry I’ll tell the world about us, Hunter,” she said like she’d been enjoying me thinking that very thing. “My husband sure as hell wouldn’t appreciate it.”

  “Then what’s the big surprise?” I asked, not ready to believe it had nothing to do with me.

  “You’ll just have to wait and see like everyone else.”

  “I don’t know what I ever saw in you,” I said, growing tired of her manipulations

  With a coy smile, she replied, “The best lay in Seattle?”

  I didn’t have words for that, too much anger—mostly at myself—for having to waste even a second dealing with Theresa when all of my attention should have been with Alli. I’d gone in search of her, the task more difficult than I’d first imagined in a ballroom that had become crowded with people. It wasn’t until nearly an hour later that I’d found her on the balcony.

  Theresa had knocked me so off kilter that I’m still not sure of the first thing I thought when Alli tried pulling me away just as a guy rounded the corner. He was tucking in his shirt and zipping his pants up, not like he’d just taken a piss, but like he’d been fucking someone.

  Alli was the only woman I could see out there, and in a moment of rage, I’d thrown a punch and was ready to beat the guy into the hard concrete beneath us when Theresa slinked her way out of the shadows.

  Of course.

  After it was clear what really happened, I had no choice but to confess my jealousy to Alli, not expecting her to come at me with a similar fear, that I’d been the guy banging Theresa in the alcove. It made me sick for her to think I’d risk our relationship for that, made me sicker that I had to omit the past I shared with Theresa.

  I’d been trying to hide that shame for the past week, and yet, even with all of the drama that had unfolded in the last few days, Alli had noticed something.

  “I’m so damn sorry this happened,” I tell her, joining her on the couch in my condo after giving her the glass of water she’d asked for.

  “It’s not your fault,” she says, thanking me for the water, taking a few sips and then setting it down on the coffee table.

  But it is. The picture I’d asked her to pose for with me at the party, the one that included Theresa and Henry, had found its way into the public sphere, no doubt with Theresa’s full approval. While I was proud to be pictured next to Alli, questions began to arise as soon as the photo began to churn through local and social media.

  Who is the stunner next to Hunter Lawrence?

  Where has Hunter Lawrence been hiding this beauty?

  Who is she, and will it last?

  The photo I’d taken with Alli at Children’s Hospital was often included with these questions, media types cursing themselves for not connecting the dots and seeing Alli as my potential love interest sooner. They might have been late with it, but their speculation eventually led to Alli’s identification and what I’m sure they saw as a treasure trove of information about a young woman who’d faced media attention for her own tragedy. The stories started coming out about the accident that killed her brother and the man she’d married the very day he died, stories no longer limited to small local papers or websites desperate for click bait. The headlines were now in big papers and on national news sites, headlines probably just as bad as the ones on any gossip page.

  Hunter Lawrence and Mystery Girl Linked by Tragic Past and Heartache For Beauty Before Meeting NFL’s Most Eligible Bachelor and Hunter Lawrence Offers Hope To Stunner Who Lost Everything!

  And those were just a few I’d seen before I went on a self-imposed media blackout.

  “I should have never pressured you to be in that picture,” I tell her. “I should have known it would get into the wrong hands and end up hurting you like this.”

  She takes my hand. “I said it’s not your fault. A picture is just a picture. I could have been any girl standing next to you, so someone had to say something about us for it to blow up like this.”

  “Someone like Theresa,” I say, her name bringing a good amount of disgust up with it.

  “Maybe,” she says with a shrug. “But it could have been anyone really. We weren’t exactly pretending we didn’t know each other. Our relationship isn’t a state secret.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” I’d kissed her at the ball with plenty of people around, and she’d been a part of my life for long enough now that even someone close to us might have let something slip without meaning to mess with our privacy. The picture just offered some extra proof.

  “And it’s not a terrible thing, Hunter. I mean, even though I hate that my parents are suddenly being bombarded with requests for interviews and people are digging up all sorts of hurtful things about my past, it kind of had to happen, right? We’d been ready to do it before.”

  I nod. “It’s the downside of being with someone famous, like a weight around your neck that won’t let you go. I’ll do everything I can to protect you, though, Alli.”

  She places her hand on my arm. “I know you will, but I think I have to be strong too. And maybe… maybe this is an opening for me to talk to you about something I hadn’t wanted to bring up before.”

  “What is it?” My stomach tightens to think it might be anything at all about Theresa. If she asked me a point blank question about her, I wouldn’t be able to lie.

  She takes in a deep breath, then slowly lets it out. “So, you know how I’ve told you that I used to work on our school paper?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Okay. Well, what I didn’t say was that I had an opportunity to work for The Mountain Gazette once I graduated, but then the accident happened, and I had a falling out with the woman I would have worked for over the way she handled it. Daniella was my friend, and it felt like she was sensationalizing my personal life just to sell papers. I barely spoke to her for over a year, but then I ran into her when you brought me to Coalton. She was telling me that she had a strange feeling that there was more to the accident that killed your mom.” She pauses and looks at me, raising her brows slightly, as if asking for permission to go on.

  I don’t like to think about the accident. It just
reminds me of how much I’ve missed, how many years have been stolen from a life my mom and aunt should have been part of. But Alli has lost just as much, and we should be able to talk about something that binds us, something the media won’t let us forget now.

  “You can tell me… whatever it is,” I say.

  At that, she eases. “Okay. So, other than a very brief article, there isn’t any real reporting on your mom’s accident in any of The Gazette’s archives. Going off of how many people attended your mother and aunt’s funerals, how so many people knew them, Daniella thought it was strange, and I do too.”

  My chest tightens. “Just some small article… that was it?”

  She tilts her chin down. “We wondered if maybe your father had asked the editor of the paper to keep things quiet, to allow you and your family to bury your loved ones without the community knowing every last detail of how they died.”

  “I don’t think so. My dad was a mess right after… well… I don’t remember him consoling us or trying to make us feel better. He wore his grief on his sleeve. I’m pretty sure the only thing on his mind was how he was going to go on without my mom.”

  She puts her hand on mine. “Do you think then, that the sheriff might have been trying to hide something, or that he was protecting someone?”

  The sheriff.

  Hiding something.

  For a moment, I’m paralyzed, can’t move or speak, just like when I was a kid. Of course the sheriff was hiding something.

  Clyde Mitchell was hiding a crime.

  A crime he committed… against me.

  I don’t like the reminder, the name of Sheriff Clyde Mitchell turning into a face, and the face becoming nightmarish memories, because he was the man who found pleasure in making my life even more hellish than it had already become after losing my mom.

  Strange that I tried so hard to get my family to acknowledge I’d been molested by a man who was supposed to be protecting our entire county when I usually tried just as hard to keep it—and especially him—out of my thoughts, something to bury after I’d put an end to it. Even before I heard that fucking bastard died, I did my damndest to be sure he’d never do to anyone else what he did to me, using his position of power as a shield.

  “Hunter? Are you all right?” Alli is shaking my arm, and I see her face, as if I’d just woken and opened my eyes.

  “I’m fine,” I say, my voice pressured because I’m not fine—I’m never fine when I have to think about that piece of human waste. “I was just thinking about my mother,” I say, not altogether untrue.

  “Of course,” she says, her body relaxing away from mine. “I’m sorry. I know talking about this brings up a lot of pain. We can save it for another time if you want.”

  It would be easy to agree to that, to brush the past back underneath the figurative bed and not have to think about tragedy or that fucking piece of shit sheriff whose death I hoped was painful enough to create some justice in the universe. But I don’t want to be weak like my father was, so wrapped up in his pain that I’m still not sure he’s ever found a way to deal with it.

  I have to be stronger than that.

  “We can talk about it now,” I say, resolute. “You just caught me off guard is all. You really think the accident might not have been as accidental as we thought?”

  “It’s a possibility. Actually, there are lots of possibilities. In my spare time, I’ve managed to look through every record available for the crash that took your mom from you.” There’s something timid in her eyes, like she’s waiting for me to get angry with her for delving into a past that has affected my entire life.

  “You find anything other than the lack of stories in the local paper?” I know the only reason Alli is doing this is because she wants to help, not hurt me.

  “Not any one thing that would be conclusive enough to say the official story isn’t the right one, but there was something odd in one of the reports from the state patrol.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Well, a motorist contacted the state patrol to say that he’d been driving in the opposite direction your mother and aunt were and that he remembers passing them. He was a teacher, so he knew your mother and the car she drove. But what he also said was, about a mile before he’d seen them, he’d passed the sheriff going in their same direction, so he was quite a ways in front of them.”

  “What am I missing?” I ask, not sure where she’s going with this, my rage for Clyde Mitchell maybe blinding me from something obvious.

  “That teacher had apparently gotten his hands on the accident report the sheriff had written,” she continues. “In it, Sheriff Mitchell said that he’d come across the accident when he was heading south on the highway, but if the teacher had passed the sheriff first, then he would have had to turn around and been heading north to just come across the accident without it having been called in.”

  My brain still isn’t as sharp as it needs to be, but I can at least picture what she’s talking about. “And what did the state patrol say about that?”

  “Not much. They said that either the driver was mistaken or that the sheriff had simply turned around and forgotten or just didn’t explain it properly in his report. Basically, whomever was investigating it didn’t think this discrepancy was a big deal either way.”

  “So he lied. The fucker lied.” I’d never had any reason to connect the sheriff in any way with my mother’s death, but just the fact that he might not have taken the proper care in writing his report up was enough to make me want to dig his grave up, twist whatever was left of his neck and then throw his remains off the highest cliff I could find.

  “We don’t know that. At some point, I’m going to try talking to Micah and see if his dad might have ever mentioned something to him about it.”

  “The guy your parents want you to marry?” I hear the curtness in my own voice, jealousy getting the better of me. But it’s more than that. Over time, I’d put two and two together, realizing, with horror, that of all the men in Coalton and Mountainside, the man Alli was very briefly married to was Clyde Mitchell’s son. And that meant his older brother, the man Alli’s parents imagined being her consolation prize, got half of his DNA from that fucking monster too, not to mention the fact he’s the current county sheriff.

  “Wanted,” she says. “That’s in the past. My dad understands how much I care about you, how much I love you. And my mom will get to that place too. She’s just been having a hard time lately. She’s still hurting over my brother.”

  I soften, not wanting to let my own anger and hurt usurp hers. “And what about you? You don’t talk about Abe much.”

  “It’s hard to talk about him,” she admits. “I still have so many regrets about us not being able to deal with everything that happened that night, with Wyatt and Olivia and my brother. Sometimes I imagine we’d have managed to finally get to a good place again if he was still here, that he might have even followed me and moved to Seattle. It’s hard to think about all of that and then realize he’s gone.”

  I hold her close to me and kiss her at her hairline, my fury dissipating. “I know the feeling, that void. I’ve only felt it begin to fill up again since I’ve known you.”

  “I feel the same way,” she says.

  She’s in my arms, and I just hold her there for a while, the quiet never feeling lonely as long as I’m with her.

  “I think we should go public,” I say, breaking the silence, “but do a proper job of it.”

  She turns her body and looks up at me. “What do you mean by that?”

  “How do you feel about an interview, you, me and whatever well known journalist we can get who’ll be willing to pay top dollar for an exclusive? We can tell our story in our own words.”

  She laughs a little nervously and sits up. “Really? You mean like one of those special presentation network interviews? They’d be interested in us?”

  “Sure they would. And we’ll do it for a good cause, donate whatever we get to Logan’s c
are and tell our story the way we want, tragedy and all.”

  “The accidents,” she says, a bit subdued.

  “Tragedy sells, unfortunately. I know it’ll be tough, but we could bring up the questions you have about my mom’s crash, maybe even get your contact from the paper in on it. Who knows—maybe someone watching might have some information.”

  Alli still looks taken aback, like she’s envisioning the lights, the camera and the action of a journalist probing at her. It might be too much, and I won’t blame her if she decides against it. But a slight smile pushes through before she finally says, “Yes. Let’s do it.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  HUNTER

  “Are you nervous?” I ask Alli. She’s sitting next to me on a couch in the television studio we’re going to be interviewed in, my own hands clammier than I’d like them to be.

  She nods. “Yes, very.”

  I wipe my hands on my dark trousers, then take one of hers in mine. “So am I, but I’ll be right here with you through all of it. And you don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to, no matter how hard Jessica pushes you.”

  A nervous smile spreads over her beautiful face. “I still can’t believe Jessica Moore is going to be interviewing us. She’s a legend.”

  “Definitely,” I agree.

  I wasn’t sure what we’d get when Alli and I asked Sheila to put the word out that we were willing to give an exclusive interview about our new relationship to the highest bidder. I didn’t want it to be some tabloid entertainment reporter and was hoping we’d get someone with at least a little journalistic integrity, especially since we’d be willing to discuss our similar tragedies. I didn’t imagine someone like Jessica Moore would show interest, though, and that we’d be sitting down to talk to her two weeks later.

  “She’s striking while the iron’s hot,” Sheila said, as impressed as any of us that a journalistic heavyweight wanted to talk to us.