7. 7
Deacon clenched his teeth and bent his head back to the bike he was working on, trying to ignore the looks the other men were giving Lisa as she disappeared into the office. He wondered what was up and what she was telling Cowboy but wouldn’t ask. If Cowboy thought he should know, he’d let Deacon know.
Less than ten minutes later she walked back out the same way she’d come, through the shop bay rather than through the office, as if she hadn’t noticed all the men watching her. Once she’d gotten into her car and left, Deacon tried to ignore the comments some of the men made. Speculating on why a woman would be visiting Cowboy in his office and wondering if Ava knew about her. There were a couple of off-color comments, but Deacon couldn’t tell who’d made them or he would have shut them up. Now wouldn’t that have started tongues wagging?
A couple minutes after Lisa pulled out, Cowboy appeared in the doorway to the office.
“Deke, can I talk to you a sec?”
“Sure.” Deacon set his wrench aside and picked up a rag as he stood. He wiped his hands as he made his way to the office. If what his friend had to say was for everyone to hear, he would have just said it there in the shop. “What you need?”
“You were over there last night, and I know I mentioned it before, but have you noticed anything off with Lisa?”
Fuck. What had she said to him? “What do you mean?” he asked with a frown. “Did she say something?” He couldn’t help the sick feeling in his stomach. Had she told Cowboy he’d spent the night?
“She hasn’t said anything, it’s just a feeling I get.” Cowboy frowned. “You saw her come in, right?”
Deacon nodded.
“She came to invite me, or us because I had planned to see Ava tonight, out to dinner. That’s three nights in a row she’s reached out or called for help. It’s odd. I get the feeling she doesn’t want to be alone. Did you notice anything off when you were there last night?”
“Not really. She was tired. Said she hadn’t slept much the night before. I cut the branch she was after, she offered me a beer. We watched a little TV and she fell asleep on the couch.” That was all he was going to tell Cowboy.
Yes, he’d spent the night, but it’s not like they did anything but sleep. And if he told his best friend that, he would only worry about his sister more, and likely beat the shit out of Deacon. Or at least try. Deacon wasn’t sure who would win these days.
Cowboy scowled and looked out the window on the far side of the room. “I don’t know. Something feels off. She says she just wants to catch up. To get to know Ava, but I don’t know.” He shook his head and turned back to Deacon. “How are things out there?” He tipped the top of his head toward the shop.
“Good. I was just wrapping up for the night, and so were the last couple of guys. Most of them already left for the day.”
“Good. Can you hang out long enough to lock the place up when everyone’s gone? I need to go pick up Ava and meet Lisa.”
“Sure, no problem. I don’t have anything else planned tonight. I’ll probably head over to the clubhouse for a bit then maybe call it an early night, so I don’t oversleep again.” He didn’t tell the club president the plan that was already forming in the back of his mind. He’d give them an hour, two tops, to finish dinner, then he would swing by Lisa’s to check on her.
He”d noticed something was off last night, but if she wasn’t telling Cowboy, he wouldn’t betray her. Instead, he’d make sure she was okay himself.
It wasn’t that he doubted Cowboy’s ability to take care of his sister, or his desire to, but Cowboy spent a lot of his time wrapped up in Ava. Deacon didn’t have any such distraction. No, it was better if he took care of this himself.
Deacon pulled his bike up in front of Lisa’s house. Her little SUV sat in the driveway and the lights in the front room were on. He had no doubt she was here. The question was, how would she react to seeing him tonight, without knowing anyone was coming over?
He climbed the steps and knocked on the door, looking around as he waited. He didn’t miss the curtain on the window beside the door twitch moments before the door opened, revealing Lisa. Deacon had to bite back a curse as he saw her. She wore what looked like an oversized t-shirt and nothing else.
“What are you doing answering the door like that? Anyone could see you.” He stepped to the side so any view of her from the street would be blocked by his body.
“I’m letting you in.” She stepped back to give him room to step inside. “And there’s nothing wrong with what I’m wearing. I’ve got shorts on.” She lifted the hem of her shirt to show him tiny cotton shorts as she closed the door, blocking out the rest of the world. “What brings you by?”
Down boy,he thought. Maybe coming by like this wasn’t his best idea.
“I just wanted to check on you. Something seemed off last night, between the branch keeping you up then you asking me to stay.”
She looked away but didn’t respond.
“I get it if you don’t want to tell your brother. I understand wanting him to think you can handle your life. But I can tell something’s wrong. He senses something is off.”
Lisa turned back to look up at him through her lashes, tears pooling in her eyes. “I can’t tell him. I don’t want him to know.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper.
Deacon’s chest ached at the fear in her voice and the misery on her face.
“Oh, bumblebee, come here.” He held his arms open and let her move in at her own speed.
When she buried her face against his chest, he wrapped his arms around her and let her cry. He hated it when she cried, he always had. At least it wasn’t something she’d ever used against him, or anyone else as far as he knew.
He hadn’t intended to find himself here, like this. Holding her while she wore little more than a t-shirt and sobbed against his chest. Yet somehow, here he was. He moved them both to the couch so he could sit.
Despite his better judgement, she climbed into his lap and continued to cry. He held on to her, patted her back and murmured what he hoped were soothing words. What else could he do? At least until she cried herself out and was ready to tell him what the problem was.
Deacon didn’t know how long they sat there, but by the time she’d exhausted her tears, his shirt had a large wet spot, and her breath came gasps and hiccups. They sat a while longer, until she sat up and brushed at his shirt.
“Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to fall apart all over you. It’s just... I can’t tell Cowboy. He won’t understand.” She looked away, as if she didn’t want him to see her face.
“First, tell me why you can’t tell him? He’s a good guy; he wouldn’t judge you, no matter what it was.”
“It’s not that. Or at least that’s not all of it. I’m his little sister and he’d totally judge me over it. Ask me how I could be so stupid. But the bigger part is that he’d try to fix it and I don’t know if he can. I’m afraid he’ll get himself in trouble trying to fix my problems. That will only make me feel worse.” She turned back to him, her eyes wide and pleading. “You have to promise not to tell him about this. I can take care of my own problems. It’s just that sometimes I get so tired of dealing with it all.”
“So share the burden. Tell me what’s going on.”
“You haven’t promised.” She turned away again. “I can’t tell you unless I know you won’t take it to him.”
Deacon took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. “Bumblebee, I can’t promise, not without knowing what it is.” He was torn. Wanting to help her battled with his loyalty to the man who was not only his best friend, but also his brother.
“Then I can’t tell you.” She started to slide off his lap, but he tightened his arms around her, keeping her from leaving.
“Not so fast. How about we try something else. I can promise not to tell him unless it’s something he needs to know.”
Lisa started to protest but he cut her off.
“Hear me out. I won’t tell him unless it involves your safety, and by that, I mean there’s an immediate threat. Does that work for you?”
She was quiet, watching him with narrowed eyes for a moment as if trying to determine if he was telling the truth, then nodded. Her body slowly relaxed against his. She turned so her back was against his chest. Deacon guessed whatever she had to tell him she didn’t want to look at him while she did it.
“I’m trying to decide where to start,” she said after a moment. “I guess it was almost a year ago. I think that’s the best place to start. You know I was living in Springfield, working in the library there, right?”
“That’s what Cowboy said.” He didn’t want to say too much. He was afraid of discouraging her from talking now that he’d gotten her started. He should get her to move off his lap, but she was so relaxed against him, and he loved the feeling of her in his arms.
“Ok, so I’m working in this library. I’d been there a while, and I was comfortable with my job. I had a little place I liked. Things were good.”
“Then something changed?”
She took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. “I was dating. Nothing serious but you know how it goes, you have to meet people to find a circle, even if you only end up being friends.”
A bolt of some feeling he didn’t want to identify shot through him. Deacon ignored it and let her continue.
“Anyway, I met this guy, he seemed nice at first. I agreed to go out with him. We started with coffee, because you know, coffee is short and public. If you don’t like the guy or he gives you the creeps, it’s just coffee and he doesn’t know much about you. Everything went well. I agreed to dinner. I met him at the restaurant, because again. I didn’t know much about him and didn’t want him to know where I lived. That went well enough I agreed to a third date.” She was quiet long enough he wondered if had decided not to tell him.
“What happened on the third date?”
“Nothing really remarkable. I met him at the movies, then the restaurant, and I let him kiss me afterwards. There was nothing. You know how when you were a kid, and some kid gets it in their head that they’re going to be your first kiss and it’s a little peck on the lips? Randy and I kissed, and it was a real kiss, but it made me feel like that grade school peck. He asked me out again after that. I made excuses. He took it well, or so I thought.”
“But he really didn’t?” Deacon didn’t even know what this Randy had done but he wanted to find him and teach him a lesson about how to treat a woman. Obviously, someone had been lax in his lessons in the past.
She sighed. “No, he didn’t. In the beginning it was minor things, if irritating. He’d call every few days, asking me out again. I told him I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t leading him on or anything. He seemed to understand, then he’d call again in a few days. I finally stopped picking up his calls.” Lisa leaned her head back until it rested on his collarbone. “Then it started to get weird.”
“Weird?”
“It started out innocently enough, or at least that’s what I thought.”
“What do you mean?” Deacon was careful not to tense or let any of what he was feeling leak into his voice, but he was ready to hurt anyone who’d scared her this badly.
“At first it was little things, a rose left under the wiper on my car. A teddy bear left on my porch. I had no clue who it had done it until Randy started texting asking if I liked his gifts.”
“I take it that it didn’t end there?” He kept his voice soft and encouraging.
Lisa shook her head. “No, it got worse. Next, I started noticing things in my house being just a little off. Furniture in my house moved. Not far, a few inches, but enough I noticed. Weird things. Pictures switched, occasionally one flipped upside down. I started running into him in random places. I’d see him sitting at a table when I stopped at the coffee shop before work, bump into him at the store, that kind of thing. He didn’t always talk to me, but did wave and at least acknowledge me. Then I started feeling like I was being watched. In the beginning it was only when I was out of the house, going to work, running errands, that kind of thing. Then after a while I felt that itch on the back of my neck all the time.”
“Did you go to the police?”
“I did, but they can’t do anything without proof and things being moved a few inches or feeling like I’m being watched isn’t proof. It only makes me sound crazy. Randy had been careful never to put anything that could be used against him in text or anything that could be traced.”
“Then what?” Deacon didn’t say that what he really wanted to do was to introduce this asshole Randy to the business end of his fist. Maybe that would teach him a lesson. And if it didn’t, well, Deacon knew some other methods that were sure to work.
“Then it got really creepy. I felt like I was being paranoid, but I started being exact about how I left things, not only when I left the house but when I went to bed. I would make sure things were placed just so, so I would know if they’d been moved.”
“That’s not paranoid, that makes sense. Especially if you suspect someone of moving things,” he tried to reassure her.
“When I started finding things moved when I woke up, it got even worse. Someone had been in the house while I slept. I had the locks changed, I got cameras.”
“Did that help?”
“No. The cameras would cut out for hours. Things were still getting moved while I slept. That’s when I made it a priority to get out of town. I’d been trying to get on here for a couple of years, but hadn’t really pushed it. That’s when I really started pursuing a position here. I made some calls and a couple weeks later had an interview, then got the call that I’d gotten the position. I hoped that moving over a thousand miles away would put an end to it.”
“Any sign it hasn’t?”
“No, not yet. But I’m still so on edge that I can’t be sure. That first night, even after I’d figured out that it was that branch on the window, every time I heard it, I knew it was him trying to get in.” She let out a big sigh. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep watching TV, but I feel safe with you here. I know if Randy were to show up, you’d know it and you would take care of it.”
“That’s why you asked me to stay.” And why she’d slept so hard. But why had he slept so well? That one wasn’t so easy to answer. It wasn’t that he had trouble sleeping but rarely slept so hard when there wasn’t a significant amount of alcohol involved. “And you’re sure you don’t want to tell Cowboy.”
“Not unless I have to. If Randy doesn’t come up here, he causes me no more trouble, there’s no reason for Cowboy to know. I handled it. It took moving away, but I handled it.”
Well, she’d handled part of the problem. The trauma the asshole had caused her, and her response to it was a different matter, but Deacon wasn’t going to bring that up, not now.
“And if he does show up?” Deacon asked, his voice soft so he didn’t scare her.
Lisa sat up and twisted around on his lap so she sat sideways and could look up at him. Her lashes were spiky with the tears she’d shed and the flush on her cheeks made him want to pull her close and tell her everything would be okay. But that wouldn’t be good.
“If he does show up, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” She tilted her head to one side and watched him for a moment. “You know, there’s something I’ve always been curious about.”
”What’s that?”
“This.” She didn’t give him time to wonder what she was thinking about or what she meant as she leaned close and kissed him.
Fire raced through his senses. Her lips parted against his, the tip of her tongue coaxed his mouth open, and he lost track of who she was and all the reasons he’d told himself for years that this couldn’t happen. All that existed was the warm, pliant woman in his arms and that she was kissing him like they were the last two humans on earth.