Chapter 23
Walker
I was right that having her in a bed is so much better than what we did back at the bar last week. The extra room, the softness of her sheets against my skin, the scent of her surrounding me, all of it made for a freaking fantastic time last night.
I stretch, tightening every muscle in my body before reaching for her.
It should be no surprise that she’s no longer in bed with me, but the cold spot beside me hits me in the chest in a way I don’t want to consider right now.
Naked as the day I was born, I sit on the side of the bed and look around the small room. She doesn’t have much in here other than her bed, a nightstand, and a small dresser.
I have no idea how this morning is going to go, but I can’t find it in me to wish I had left last night. She never asked me to leave, but I could feel her desire to do just that in the stiffness of her body when I pulled her to my chest. Exhaustion won out, however, and she fell asleep in my arms.
I grind my teeth, thinking about her crying last night and what an utter asshole Barrett was. The man has a formal education. He should know better than to deliver news the way he did.
There isn’t a single thing I can do about Barrett right now, so I shove him from my mind. There’s a sexy-as-hell woman somewhere in this house, and I have every intention of getting her beneath me again.
She enters the room just as I stand. She barely even looks up from her coffee cup before pulling my folded clothes from the top of her dresser.
Placing them on the end of the bed, she keeps her distance. It’s clear she wants me gone, and maybe a different man would take the hint, but this is now twice this woman has been dismissive of me. It rankles.
I don’t know the best way to respond, and that has more to do with her being closed off and not letting anyone get close to her than anything else.
She opens up for me when I have her naked and our skin is touching, and the way her simple cotton robe is teasing her thighs makes me want that exact scenario.
I walk across the room, reaching for her. She side-steps me, placing her cup of coffee on the dresser before standing in the doorway of her bathroom.
She opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.
She shakes her head, a disappointed look on her face, before disappearing into the room and closing the door behind her. The echo of the lock clicking into place is just one more slap in the face.
I have no way of knowing if her disappointment is in herself or if she’s placing that blame on me. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a little of both.
Annoyed, I grab my shirt and pull it over my head before shoving my legs so hard into my boxer briefs, I hear threads snap. My slacks are more of a struggle because they’re less willing to be abused.
I know I should leave once my boots are on, but that bone-deep annoyance I have for being dismissed has already eaten a hole inside of me.
I cross her room, intent on my own form of justice in the form of drinking her damn coffee.
The logo on the cup is for a cash advance loan place in El Paso. It’s warm in my hands when I lift it to my mouth. It should be no surprise that the woman is drinking plain black coffee.
I choke down the liquid, my spite stronger than my distaste for the harshness of the drink.
My eyes catch on a stack of mail, and although I know it’s absolutely none of my business, it doesn’t stop me from picking the top piece of paper up. I’d like to think that I wouldn’t pull mail from an envelope, but seeing as the documents are sitting on top of the envelope they were delivered in, I don’t have to make that choice today.
I shouldn’t have any feelings whatsoever about seeing HUXLEY AND CLAIRE KENNEDY at the top of the default letter, but the reminder of who she is is a slap in the face.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve told myself to stay away from her, but at this point, that voice is no longer a scream. It’s barely been a whisper since she started working at the bar, and I knew it would be. It’s why I avoided her for as long as I did.
My anger grows as I read the letter. This has to be why she needed the job at the bar.
The credit card company expresses its distaste in her lack of substantial payments. The letter reminds her that making minimum payments on such a high balance won’t get her any closer to paying the credit card off.
The woman is working herself into an early grave and for what? Because she can’t keep her spending under control?
She’s put me in a position where I’ve crossed a line no serviceman should’ve ever crossed because she buys a bunch of shit she probably doesn’t need.
I’m livid by the time she opens the bathroom door, but I won’t allow myself to get lost in the sight of her standing there in nothing but a thin towel.
“Why are you still here?” she snaps.
“I want you to explain this,” I tell her, holding up the paperwork like I have any business looking at it, much less confronting her.
“You have got to be clinically insane for going through my things.”
I hate the waver in her voice, but this isn’t just about her. I had every intention of staying away from this woman but despite my annoyance with what I’ve found, I still want to get close to her. I want to be her hero. I want to take care of everything that might stress her out.
That pisses me off even more because it wasn’t supposed to be like this. She was Hux’s wife, his responsibility. My anger shifts, and how fucked up is it to be angry at a man for dying?
“Maybe if you stopped maxing out your credit cards, you wouldn’t have to be working two jobs.”
Her jaw tightens, hands forming fists like she’s imagining punching me in the nose.
“You’d have more time with your daughter, but you what? Sacrifice it for clothes? Shoes? Designer handbags?”
“Are you for real right now?” she growls as she walks over and pulls open the closet door.
She yanks the string to the light so hard the cord comes off in her hand.
“Does it look like I have designer anything?” she screams as she throws the now useless cord to the floor.
Something I can’t pinpoint starts to roil inside my gut.
She crosses the room, yanking the paperwork from my hand. “I haven’t used that damn credit card once.”
Flashes of what I know about the woman take over. The issue with her car. The shifts at the bar. The sadness that’s always in her eyes. Her claim that she hasn’t used the credit card is the magnet that puts it altogether.
That motherfucker.
Huxley died and left her with his debt.
I pull in a deep breath, but there’s nothing that can prepare me for the gut-wrenching pain in her eyes when they start to shimmer with tears.
Her hand clutches the paperwork, the crinkle of it in her fist the only sound in the room before her first sob.
I step closer to her as her chest heaves, but she glares at me. As much as I want to comfort her right now, I know this isn’t the right time, considering I’m the one who made her cry.
“Claire,” I whisper.
She dashes at her tears with the back of her hand as if it pisses her off even more that this is the way her body has decided to deal with the anger.
“He’s a complete piece of shit,” I say instead. “How can a man in love leave his pregnant wife in that kind of debt?”
My late Grandma June would roll over in her grave if she knew I was speaking ill of the dead, but facts are facts.
“He didn’t love me!” she yells, her face growing redder as her tears show no sign of slowing.
She walks past me and drops down to sit on the end of the bed.
“I know it feels like that right now,” I say, having no clue why I’m defending his ass in this moment.
“You don’t understand. We didn’t get married because we were in love.”
I tilt my head to the side at hearing her confession.
Finding out that Huxley Kennedy was married never made much sense to me when the rumors were whispered around town, but when I saw Claire in town for the first time, it made so much sense. I was attracted to her that very first day, and those feelings grew with every additional time I saw her, be it walking down the street, at one of the town festivals, or as she walked up and down the aisle at the grocery store.
“Because you were pregnant,” I surmise.
She dips her head. “Classic, right? Girl gets pregnant after a one-night stand and she marries the guy without even knowing hardly anything about him.”
My cheeks fill with air, my face swelling briefly before it slips past my lips.
This is a lot of information to process. I know better than to think that she’s confiding in me for any other reason than she’s met her limit of people being in her business. I’m just one more person who has been nosy in her life, and I hate that I’ve put her in the position to confess when this secret wasn’t mine to have. It’s not something, had I not pushed, that she ever would’ve spoken out loud, and that makes me as big of a piece of shit as Hux.
“I’m sorry,” I say, my apology encapsulating so many things.
She shakes her head. “It’s not your fault. He put me on his account in case I needed anything. I really think he was trying his best to be the good guy. It’s not like he planned on dying, but I bet you have opinions about that as well. Go ahead and call me a whore so you can get it out of your system. I’d like to get dressed and go pick up Larkin. I’m already running late.”