Chapter Twelve #2
I eye a blue spruce, gauging its adequacy when I hear a squeal. It’s followed by a tumble of laughter that grows louder, closer. I barely have a chance to turn when a figure darts out from between the rows and collides straight into my chest.
Her scent of cinnamon hits me like a train. It fills my senses a full second before I realize who my arms are holding in place.
Isla, eyes bright, cheeks pink, stares up at me with such an unhampered expression of happiness I suck in a breath. She’s panting and smiling, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her smile like this.
Not at me.
Not at all.
“Sorry.” She giggles. “I was…”
Dom rounds the corner after her, hair wild and windswept. Eyes dark with mischief. He grabs her sides with all ten fingers and Isla shrieks and flails in my arms. Her face collides with my chest. Her fingers fist in my jacket like she’s expecting me to save her.
“Where do you think you’re running off to?” Dom taunts, hooking his arms around her middle, over mine and attempting to drag her from me.
My arms tighten.
Instinctively.
Possessively.
I grip her to me and Dom realizes and stops pulling. He doesn’t let go either and we have her pinned between us. Held in place where she fucking belongs.
And it feels right.
So. Fucking. Right.
It must show on my face because I see it on Dom’s. I see it in the steady hold of his gaze fixed on mine. In the breath he’s struggling to control. He’s watching me with a plea I can’t pretend I don’t understand.
Isla must realize something’s wrong. Must feel the change. Her face lifts off my chest and I’m the first person she fixes those big eyes on. Her cheeks are bright with exertion. Her lips are parted. And she’s watching me like I’m supposed to know what to do.
I do.
I want to kiss her.
I want to taste the stray snowflakes off her skin. I want to rub our cold noses together while fisting my fingers through her hair.
But I set her free.
I release her into Dom’s embrace and turn to the tree I’d been studying.
“This looks good.”
???
“He doesn’t even want you there.”
“We are much too busy to move our plans around to accommodate you. You are being selfish.”
“You are honestly so selfish most days.”
“You can’t do anything right.”
The conversation between Isla and her parents play through my thoughts as I watch Isla throw her head back and cackle at whatever Dom’s telling her.
She hasn’t stopped. Her smile hasn’t wavered.
She’s so happy it’s painful to look straight at and I had nothing to do with it.
It’s all Dom. Even now as he playfully swats her with a discarded branch, her laughter fills the parking lot.
People glance at them in passing, smile and carry on with their day. To the world, they appear to be a cute couple enjoying the week before Christmas. Not a soul would have guessed the morning she’s had.
“He doesn’t even want you there.”
“You can’t do anything right.”
From her own parents.
My dad has never been all that attentive or caring, but he’s never talked to me like I was something he peeled off his shoe. Mom would never. Neither has ever even raised their voices.
Yet the words I heard her parents throw at her, the careless, disgusting venom they spewed to hurt her... I’m baffled.
I’m pissed.
Who does that to their own daughter?
To Isla.
Across the lot, she grabs Dom’s wrist when he goes for another swing and the two howl and cling to each other when she accidentally elbows him in the jaw.
My lips twitch even as I battle the bubbling rage choking my lungs.
They wanted to hurt her. Their words had been blades slashing tiny, thin lines. Deep enough to scar, but shallow enough to hide behind feigned concern.
I have never met Isla’s dad. Never had a need to. From the stories Macie has told over the years, he hadn’t been a good father. Absent, verbally abusive. After Isla was born, he’d grown distant. She suspected he was cheating, but could never prove it.
I believe everything after hearing him today.
What I’m having a harder time believing is her portrayal of Isla. As a teenager, by Macie’s account, she had been wild. Reckless. A pathological liar. Antisocial and flaky. She’d run away from home multiple times. Had been verbally argumentative towards her mother. Macie had been at her wits end.
I tried to see that whenever I went to visit. I never did. Macie insisted she always stayed on her best behavior when people were around, just to make Macie look bad.
Isla wasn’t... isn’t my problem.
She hadn’t been then and she sure as hell isn’t now. During her teenage years, I had my own life to live. I was neck deep in school, trying to prepare for the bar. As an adult, I began to see it.
While she wasn’t out of control, I was very aware of her vanishing into the night.
Usually on the final day of her visit, she’d be gone before anyone even woke up.
Her consistent change of address, phone number, location had been another hint.
Macie joked once that she was trying to hit every state in the US.
But all I saw was someone incapable of staying put, setting in roots, building a foundation.
She was unreliable. Someone who couldn’t be trusted to make a commitment.
I stand by my original theory. Even as I watch her with Dom and see how perfect they are together, how perfect she would be with us, I’m not ready to lay my heart down for her to stomp on as she’s bolting for the door.
Isla’s shriek pulls me from my thoughts, and I watch Dom wrestle her across the hood of the truck.
He plants her face first against the cold metal.
Her feet are kicked wide and he cuffs both wrists at her back with one of his hands.
All humor vanishes as he — like I do — realizes the position he’s gotten her in.
The plump globes of her ass are perfectly level with his crotch.
Isla must have realized it, too. She’s not fighting. She’s barely moving. Her every labored pant fans across the surface of Jacob’s truck.
Dom releases her quickly and steps back.
I don’t know who’s more disappointed. I think it’s me.
But Isla straightens, unsteady hands tugging down the hem of her coat.
All humor is gone, but Dom still turns her to him and brushes her cheek where it had been pressed into the grime.
And even that is so profound. So intimate when her face is tipped to his and he’s making gentle sweeps with his thumb.
“Nicolas?”
I clear my throat and turn to face Tom Mitchell, Pine Meadows’ owner.
He offers me a lopsided smile and hands me my receipt for the bundled tree he has wheeled over.
I take it and stuff it into my pocket. I offer him a thanks before turning my attention back to the two murmuring to each other in hushed whispers.
It dawns on me that I should be annoyed. I should at the very least feel some shred of jealousy. Dom is my boyfriend. Man or woman, I know I would not like him being touched by someone else, never mind the public display of affection he’s showing the tiny brunette held to his chest with one arm.
But I move towards them, unbothered. Even when Dom brushes a kiss to the tip of her nose and she smiles up at him.
“Let’s load the tree,” I tell him instead.