It was hard. Excruciating, really. While he’d more than proven that he wanted me physically, I’d been in love with that man for the majority of my life. It didn’t matter one bit that I didn’t know his favorite color or what he did in his spare time. I knew that he was good, honest, caring, and kind. I knew that he’d risked his life for a little girl. And I knew his world started and ended with his daughter. I didn’t need to know anything else.
But I did need to shave my damn legs because, while slowing down meant not stripping his clothes off the second he walked through the door, it thankfully didn’t mean he would keep his hands to himself.
Twelve minutes later, I pulled the door open and found him standing on the other side. It was Casual Caven in low-slung jeans and a T-shirt that hugged his broad shoulders and showed off that sexy tattoo.
“What happened to my twenty minutes?” I asked, securing the end of my wet braid with a hair tie.
He grinned and gave me a quick head-to-toe, the wolfish curl of his lips signaling his approval of my sleep shorts and tank top.
“You sounded desperate for me in your text, so I came as fast as I could.”
My eyebrows shot up my makeup free face. “Oh, did I now?”
He walked in carrying a paper bag in one hand, trailing his fingertips across my stomach as he passed. He set the bag on the bar in my kitchen, and removed two white boxes, and two sets of plastic cutlery.
I went straight to my pantry and pulled out a bag of pretzels before dumping them into a bowl.
He eyed me curiously. “What are those for?”
“To dip in the cheesecake.”
His eyes did a slow blink. “What is it with you and dipping random food?”
“I think I have lazy taste buds. I don’t taste sweets after the first bite unless I mix it with something salty.” I lifted a pretzel in the air and scraped off the top of the New York-style cheesecake. Then I popped it into my mouth. He watched in disgust as I chewed with a grin. “Don’t look at me like that. Pretzels covered in pretty much anything are widely accepted. It’s not like I’m dipping my pizza in birthday cake or anything. Though you should be warned that’s another favorite of mine.”
“Have you always been like that?”
I shrugged. “As long as I can remember.”
His lips twitched as he crowded me in the best possible way. His hand went to my hip. “Ice cream is the only exception, huh?”
“Nope. I use pretzels for that too.”
He gave me a squeeze, a shadow fluttering across his face. “You didn’t seem to have a problem while we were sharing that carton of Ben and Jerry’s back in the day.”
Oh, shit.
Oh, fucking shitty shit.
And this was precisely the problem with giving him Willow while pretending to be Hadley.
Hadley had always gagged at my crazy food combinations. She was a simple girl who ate meat and loved ice cream. I had been a vegetarian since I was ten and a salt and sweet mixer since…well, forever.
I picked up my bowl of pretzels, stacked the box with the cheesecake on top, and carried it to the coffee table in front of my couch. “Well, I wasn’t about to expose that level of crazy on the first night.”
“You were naked and planning to steal my computer. Pretzels and ice cream would have been a drop in the bucket.”
My stomach rolled. It was a joke, and I applauded him for his ability to even speak about that night without seeing red. But he was teasing me about the night my sister had gone above and beyond to shatter my heart. It was the reason we had been fighting when she’d sped off in my car, ultimately hitting a tree and losing her life. And it was the reason the last thing I ever said to her as I screamed into her voicemail was, “You were wrong. I will always I hate you.”
I didn’t know if she ever heard that message.
But I’d said it. I’d left those words dangling in the universe just moments before she took her final breath.
Maybe I deserved the slash through the heart he’d caused with his little stroll down memory lane.
I avoided his gaze by retrieving my remote from the drawer and then a blanket hanging on the ladder across the room. “Anyway. You want to watch a movie or something?”
“Shit. Hadley.”
God, I’d have given anything to hear Willow roll off his tongue. Just once. But that was the price I had to pay to keep Rosalee.
She was worth it all.
He set the tiramisu on the coffee table and sank beside me on the couch. “You know I was kidding, right?”
I nodded and clicked the button to turn the TV on, desperate for a distraction.
He plucked the remote from my hand and set it on the table. “Look at me.”
I swallowed hard.
I was Hadley.
I had a daughter who deserved a mother who loved her.
He wasn’t the boy who had saved my life.
He was just Caven. Nothing more.
I plastered on a smile that I hoped looked more genuine than it felt and turned toward him. “What kind of movie are you in the mood for? Action? Suspense? Comedy?”
“I shouldn’t have called you crazy,” he rushed out, taking my hand in his and intertwining our fingers.
I willed my smile not to falter. “You didn’t call me crazy, crazy.”
“I did and I’m sorry. You told me you were in a bad place the night we met, and I know how brutal the memories can be sometimes, and finding a way to survive is never crazy.”
I could have lived the rest of my life in complete and utter happiness if I never heard another apology from Caven Hunt again. “It’s okay. You weren’t wrong. That night was crazy.”
“Still.” He sighed and sagged against the couch. Lifting his arm, he silently invited me into his side. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
It was an offer I would never refuse. He could call me Hadley every day. But in his arms, I would always feel like Willow.
Tucking my legs up beneath me, I settled into his curve and dragged the blanket on top of us both. “You don’t have to censor yourself with me. I know we have a past. It sucks. But it exists. I’m not upset.”
“That night sometimes feels like the elephant in the room with us. I thought maybe, if we could make light of it, it wouldn’t feel so damn awkward all the time. I still remember so much from that night, but at the same time, it feels like it was a different life.”
Because it was—at least for me.
“Elephants were meant to live in the wild. Maybe we should let this one go.”
He kissed the top of my head. “I like how easy you make everything sound.”
“Good. I like the way you bring me cheesecake.”
He laughed, and it finally broke the fog of regret swirling all around us, but as I traced my fingers over the black tattooed feathers on his forearm, an awkward silence settled in its place.
We needed a subject change. Something light. Something innocuous. Something…
“Two of those are for your parents.”
My fingers stilled, and my stomach churned. I had no idea what he was talking about, but if the gravel in his voice was any indication, I didn’t want to know, either. I’d told him once that time only marched in one direction. But Caven was clearly headed back to the past.
“My mom…” He paused to clear the emotion from his throat. “When I was ten, my mom died of cancer. She knew her time was coming, so she started talking to me and Trent about it a lot. I guess to prepare us. She never used the word ‘dying’ though. She would say things like soon she was going to get her angel wings.”
I sucked in a sharp breath, dread rolling in like a thunderstorm as I waited for the part where this sad story from his childhood somehow converged with my parents and his tattoo.
“After the mall, I tried to go on with my life. Trent didn’t really understand what I was going through. I pretended a lot. Pushed the guilt to the back of my head. Compartmentalizing.” His lips curled in a devastated
smile. “It didn’t work. When I graduated high school, I went off to college and met Ian. He was the first person to see how bad things really were inside my head. He forced me into a therapist’s office, and day after day, for years, he went to war with me. It took a lot time for me to be able to face what Malcom did that day, and to a certain degree, I will always blame myself for what happened at that food court. But forty-eight people gained their angel wings that day. And it seemed like a tragedy to allow guilt to steal a life that had been spared. I got this as a reminder that I have a lot of angels I need to live for.”
I physically ached, and tears welled in my eyes as I silently counted each feather, ticking off all the names I’d memorized shortly after the shooting. My therapist had told me that it wasn’t healthy to obsess about the victims. But how could I not?
Caven turned his arm over, palm up, as I gently tapped each one, working my way around.
My parents would be last. My father was the first to die in that shooting, but as a girl, when I fell asleep at night reciting that list of victims like most people would count sheep, I’d hoped that somehow, someway, when I got to the end, my parents’ names would no longer be there.
They always were.
And it was no different as I got to the last few feathers on Caven’s arm.
Robert.
Keira.
I stilled my finger, lingering over the longest feather that ran from wrist to elbow on the blade of his ulna. I’d seen that tattoo countless times over the last few months, but for the first time, I noticed that this particular feather was a deep red instead of black.
“Forty-nine,” I whispered, peering up at him in question.
His face warmed as he stared down at me, his blue eyes twinkling with unshed emotion. “That one’s for a different kind of angel.”
“Your mom?”
He shook his head. “I tried to help this little girl when the shooting first started, but she ended up saving my life. I’ve always thought of her as my guardian angel of sorts.”
My.
Heart.
Stopped.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. My entire body felt like it was shutting down.
Everything except for my head, which was screaming for him to say my name.
But if he said it, I’d be forced to take the final plunge. Dive into the deep. Past the point of no return.
There was no hiding that my supposed sister’s name was Willow. When I’d told Beth that I wanted to come back for Rosalee, she’d argued with me tooth and nail, determined to point out every possible angle in which my plan would fail.
She came up with nothing.
But the one thing she’d repeated over and over again as we flew back from Puerto Rico was that if I went to Caven—if I became Hadley Banks—Willow would have to be gone. Forever.
And that meant, if the day came and Caven realized Willow Banks was the girl from the mall, I was going to have to sit back and lie to the only man who ever deserved the truth.
At the time, I didn’t think it would matter. As far as I knew, Caven had never thought of me again after that day in the mall. I’d spent the better part of my adolescence trying to get in touch with him, but he’d never reached out to me. I’d gambled on coming back thinking he wouldn’t even make the connection with my last name. And for months, he hadn’t.
But there it was.
A red feather on his arm.
Proof that he remembered me.
Thought about me.
Cared about me.
He thought I was his guardian angel.
A pained chill traveled down my spine.
I had known that this day would come, but I wasn’t ready.
I wasn’t ready for Willow to be gone forever.
I wasn’t ready to lie and watch the man I owed everything mourn for the girl sitting directly in front of him.
If he said her name, I’d have no choice but to tell him. And that couldn’t happen. Though I wasn’t sure what was going to come out of my mouth if and when I opened it.
My mind told me to stay on track. To focus on Rosalee.
But my heart—it screamed at deafening decibels to confess it all.
I’m Willow.
I’m Willow.
I’m Willow.
In the end, I said nothing.
“Christ, do I know how to ruin a night or what?” He dragged me on top of his lap, cradling me as tears dripped from my chin. He lifted the bottom of his shirt, bringing it up to wipe my face. “You know, one of these days, we’re going to hang out and I’m not going to make you cry.”
I wasn’t so sure about that.
“Good tears,” I lied.
He shot me a side-eye. “Bullshit.”
“You have feathers for my parents on your arm,” I choked out. But what I really wanted to say was, You have a feather on your arm for me.
“I wish I didn’t,” he confessed with a heartbreaking regret that wasn’t even his to own.
“I wish that too.”
“You should hate me, ya know,” he murmured, nuzzling me with the scruff on his cheek.
“No more than you should hate me.”
His forehead crinkled as he screwed his eyes shut. “It’s not the same.”
Wrapping my hand around his tattoo, I lifted his arm and hugged it against his chest. “What if we let all the elephants go? The whole damn herd. What if we just become two strangers? What if you just fall in love with your daughter’s art teacher?”
His eyes flashed open. I hadn’t meant to say love. We weren’t even really dating. But as much as I wanted to take it back, as much as I knew it was an impossibility, we were wishing—and that was my greatest wish of all.
He kissed me. Slow and sad. It was moments like these where he was that teenage boy again, lost in emotion and remorse, bearing the crushing burden of a sociopath he couldn’t control.
And I was lost in a little girl’s fairytale where they all live happily ever after.
I remained in his arms for over two hours.
Part of that time, we talked.
Part of it, we kissed.
Part of it, we sat there allowing the silence to say more than we ever could.
As I cuddled in close, listening to the staccato of his heart—the very pulse he had risked in order to keep me safe—I came to the realization that I couldn’t keep lying to him.
I couldn’t tell him his guardian angel was dead.
I couldn’t hurt him more than Malcom already had.
But I had no idea how I would ever tell him the truth.
CAVEN
“Are you allowed to take things out of Hadley’s purse?”
“No,” Rosalee replied sheepishly, refusing to make eye contact with either of us.
“Go wash your face, brush your teeth, and then get in bed. No TV tonight.”
Her head popped up. “That’s not fair!”
I waved my hand out to the lipstick handprints smeared on the bathroom wall. “Need I say more.”
“Fine,” she muttered.
“Don’t you fine me,” I scolded as she marched up the stairs. “And hold onto the rail!”
She snaked a hand out to catch the wooden railing while huffing, “Fiiiiiine.”
I wasn’t going to make it through the teenage years. No ifs about it.
I looked at Hadley. She had her hand over her mouth, hiding what was no doubt an epic grin.
It had been three weeks since Hadley had scammed me into buying her painting.
And, well, three weeks since I’d scammed Hadley into spending every Monday night with me.
We’d yet to have sex again. She’d made it clear that she wanted to slow things down. I understood—hated it, but understood it nonetheless.
We were learning to be friends. Something I never would have dreamed possible only months earlier. But I had to admit: She made it easy.
Well, as easy as it could be when kinda-sorta, not-really falling in love with the
mother of your child.
The one your child didn’t yet know was her mother.
And the very same one that was probably going to file for at the very least partial custody in two months when our supervised visitation agreement expired.
Yeah. Nothing about that was easy.
However, denial was a hell of a drug.
“What are you laughing at? That was your lipstick she ruined.”
She moved her hand. And… Yep. Epic smile. “I can buy new lipstick. The look on your face is priceless.”
“The last time she colored on the wall, I had to have the entire hallway repainted because the guy couldn’t match the color.”
She curled her lip. “It’s masking-tape beige. How hard could it be to match that?”
I scowled and that epic smile of hers somehow stretched. I fought the urge to kiss it off her damn face, but with Rosalee awake and upstairs, my lips were required to stay on their own face for a while longer.
We’d been doing our best to keep our…whatever the fuck was happening between us a secret from Rosalee. She’d more than likely still caught the occasional eye-fuck exchange, but without preschool Love Expert Jacob to explain it to her, I felt we were reasonably safe that she wouldn’t catch on to the rest of… Shit, maybe I needed Jacob to explain to me what was happening.
I was addicted to Hadley and the absolute comfort she provided our family. It was funny how natural it felt having her around. I was trying hard to live by the rules Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. But the hollowness from knowing she was fifteen minutes and a phone call away on all the other days of the week was starting to wear me down.
If she were any other woman, I wouldn’t have been staring at my ceiling every night, my fingers aching to connect with her even if it was only through text.
Sure, I had a daughter, but she had a bedtime of eight.
I could have seen Hadley every night of the week. I could have taken her to nice dinners, bars—whatever people did on dates nowadays.
But she wasn’t any other woman.
She was Rosalee’s mother.
And I was starting to feel like we needed to let my daughter in on that secret sooner rather than later.
“Welp. I should really get going before you ask me to stay and help you clean,” Hadley announced.
Written With You Page 5