Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
FLYNN
Once we knew where we were going, the ride was a little easier, but still dangerous. As badly as Brooks wanted to get to Xavier, he had the sense to understand the danger he’d be putting himself, his mount, and all of us in if he tried to climb the trail any faster.
Since Curtis seemed to know where we were headed, he and his horse were at the beginning of the line. With it being too narrow for the horses to walk alongside one another, that meant Brooks was riding in the middle and Jules and I were last.
While the night air wasn’t overly cold, the dampness made it uncomfortable. I hadn’t even considered that fact as I’d moved Jules to the front of the saddle. In addition to being slapped by tree limbs if he didn’t duck in time, the younger man was shivering. He hadn’t complained even once, though. He also hadn’t tried to keep his body separate from mine after he realized how much more dangerous that made the ride not only for him, but for me and even BJ as well.
“Hold the reins,” I said to Jules, keeping my voice low. He automatically did what I said. I quickly removed my jacket and began to drape it over Jules’s shoulders, but he glanced at the jacket and shook his head.
God, the man was so damn stubborn. I wondered if he even understood the concept of trust.
“Jules, let me put it on you. It?—”
“Just hold me tighter, Flynn,” Jules murmured.
Caught off guard by the request and Jules subsequently pressing his back against my chest so that he was relying on my grip to keep him upright, I quickly put the jacket back on and then wrapped my arms around him, cocooning him in warmth as best I could. Jules’s willingness to cooperate meant I could protect his head from the sharp branches that had been scraping his skin.
He had finally stopped shivering in my hold when BJ stumbled over something. Jules gasped and grabbed the saddle horn.
“I’ve got you, Jules,” I reminded him. “BJ’s got both of us, okay?” I whispered into his ear. “Just think about that ‘just okay-looking’ guy in that movie and how sure-footed his horse was. That’s us.”
Jules nodded and then, surprisingly, released his death grip on the saddle horn and tucked his bare hands into the folds of the sheepskin lining of my jacket.
“He was gorgeous, but he’s got nothing on you,” he said. My stomach flip-flopped. Was Jules actually saying?—
“That horse was amazing, Banana Jammies, but you’ll always be my favorite,” Jules continued, quickly extracting one hand so he could give BJ a pat on the neck.
I sighed and shook my head. Of course, Jules had been talking to my horse. Whatever momentary trust Jules was giving to me, it was just that—momentary. As soon as we got back to the ranch, he’d forget about my presence altogether. This moment wasn’t going to change how I’d treated him on the top of that hill the previous day. If anything, I should have been happy about that because I’d bared my soul to Jules when I’d admitted that my heart attacks had done just as much damage to my psyche as they’d done to my body, and he’d walked away like I’d been telling him about the weather. Then he’d disappeared without a word and I’d forgotten to feel anything except terrified that I’d never see him again.
I’d spent the rest of the evening and the start of a sleepless night driving myself crazy with worry and then, just like that, he’d been pounding on my door in the middle of the night telling me Xavier had gone missing.
“Don’t pout,” Jules said, keeping his voice low. “You’re gorgeous and you know it. It doesn’t change the fact that you suck, though.”
I found myself smiling. I must have made some kind of rumbling sound or something because Jules immediately added, “I mean suck in the bad way, not the good way.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s both,” I responded lightly. “I mean, I guess all those hot little moans and sexy as hell demands could’ve been faked, but I don’t think a guy shoots that much jizz down someone’s throat unless the sucking is pretty damn?—”
Jules elbowed me hard. “Shhhh!”
Despite the seriousness of the circumstances, I knew verbally sparring with Jules would ensure he didn’t notice any unevenness in BJ’s gait as the horse continued to adjust his body based on where he needed to put his hooves.
I kept my mouth close to Jules’s ear so only he could hear me and said, “I can still taste you.”
Without a doubt, Jules would have been sending me his best death glare if he’d been able to. When he didn’t respond, I couldn’t help but poke the bear. “And the way you were holding my head down?—”
“Oh my God, shut up,” Jules growled.
“I’m not sure I can,” I drawled. “There are so many details about earlier?—”
“Fine,” Jules snapped. “If you need to hear the sound of your own voice, finish telling me about Frank, his wife, and Titan.”
“I think it’s the other way around… I like hearing the sound of your voice,” I said truthfully. “What made you run away?”
“I didn’t. Brooks and I went?—”
“Not today,” I clarified. “The day you burned your arm. You wanted me to tell you something no one else knew about me and you said?—”
“That I ran away from home,” Jules said on a soft sigh.
“Yeah,” I responded softly. I hadn’t considered that the question would take Jules to someplace he didn’t want to be. My intent in talking to him had been to keep him relaxed, but the second I’d mentioned him running away from home, he’d tensed in my hold. Even now, he was stiff as a board against me.
“You said you were an ex-banker,” Jules began.
It took me a moment to remember when I’d told him that. It’d been in the motel room after he’d been treated for his burn. I’d exposed my chest to Jules so he could feel the heavy line of scar tissue running down the center of it.
“Investment banker,” I responded.
“In Manhattan?”
I wasn’t sure where Jules was headed, but it was easy enough to answer. “Yeah. I lived at Fifty-ninth and Sixth.”
“How long were you there? In the city.”
“Five, maybe six years in all.”
Jules let out a quiet laugh. “Nice building. Access to the park, thirty-seven floors, which means a nice view if you were near the top. Doorman, valet. Just off a complete renovation about the time you moved in, right?”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess that would make you FBI? Or IRS.”
I heard Jules let out a light chuckle. It felt like a ray of determined sunlight breaking through a blanket of dark clouds.
“I know the guy who owns that building. You know him too… intimately.”
I was so startled that BJ reacted to my touch on the reins by coming to an abrupt halt. “ You own that building?” I asked loudly.
Too loudly.
Jules began shushing me but since BJ had stopped, we were far away enough from the others that they hadn’t heard me. I got BJ moving again.
“Yes and no. I mean, I’d have to look it up to see if that is legally one of mine or my father’s.”
“Your father?” I asked in confusion.
“Either way, the deed has the name Julian Graves somewhere on it.”
“Graves? As in the Graves real estate empire?” I responded, unable to keep the shock from my voice.
“Well, I guess it’s safe to say your city-boy speak is up to par. I think Dad’s ultimate goal is to be a multiverse or something, but I think you have to be worth more than a couple billion dollars to join that club.”
“Okay, sweetheart, you’re going to need to talk me through this one,” I said. “I guess I shouldn’t be calling you that, huh? You probably have a certain title like Your Majesty or Your Highness that I need to start calling you by,” I joked.
To my surprise, Jules’s fingers covered the hand I had at his waist.
“Sweetheart’s good” was all he said. The way he said it answered most of the questions bouncing around my head.
“Sweetheart it is,” I said softly before dropping a kiss to the top of his head.
“Brooks doesn’t know. He only knows me by my mother’s maiden name. I learned the hard way what it meant when it came to having friends and endless amounts of cash at your disposal.”
“No one will hear it from my lips,” I assured him. I paused for a moment before saying, “Speaking of lips?—”
“Your turn,” Jules interrupted. “Frank and Titan,” he reminded me.
I chuckled. “Right. So I guess you could say Frank and his wife sort of adopted me in spirit. Once Frank realized he couldn’t get rid of me, he started teaching me stuff about horses. In the beginning, I was only sleeping a few hours a night because I had to get up early in the morning to get to Frank’s. I’d get a couple hours of training in before I had to get home to do my real job. When I was done for the day, I’d wait until the house was quiet before I’d sneak back to Frank’s and work with his horses some more. My brother was the only one who figured out what I was up to.”
“Your twin? West?”
“Yeah. He covered for me as long as he could, but I didn’t know how much he paid for protecting my secret. All us kids got knocked around now and then, but West was the one who stood up for our younger brothers and sisters. While I was playing horse whisperer, West was getting his ass kicked left, right, and everywhere in between. I was too selfish to even notice.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Jules responded.
“Problem was, I did know. I saw him change. It was slow, but it was there. West was smart and resourceful. He was also a thousand times stronger than me, but nowhere near as selfish. I wanted to escape the life I was supposed to be living so I did. I pretended that Frank and his wife were my family. I had this bright spot in my life for the first time I could remember, and I didn’t want to let it go. I built my dreams around the one Frank and his wife had. They weren’t rich or well known. They weren’t finely educated, they didn’t lose themselves in drugs, alcohol, or gambling. So while I was reaching for that same dream, I lost sight of the life I’d been born into. When West finally called me on it, we had this huge fallout. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he’d started doing more than just moving the drugs our family made.”
“He became an addict,” Jules offered.
“Full blown. We basically turned on each other, though I was the one who deserved it for leaving him behind like I did. Frank’s wife had died by then, so all Frank had in his life was Titan and a few other horses. Those horses were the only thing that kept that old man going. I was still going to see him every day, but there was nothing I could do for him. A couple months before I turned sixteen, I went to see Frank like I always did. I knew something was wrong as soon as I set foot on their property. It was quiet. All kinds of wrong quiet.”
I must have gone silent as I relived the moment because the next thing I knew was that BJ had stopped and Jules was saying my name over and over. The warmth of his fingers rubbing over mine helped bring me back from the ugly, dark path I’d started to mentally wander down.
“Flynn…”
“I’m okay,” I reassured Jules. “Sorry.” I got BJ going again. Jules didn’t pressure me to continue, nor did he urge me to stop. He gave me the freedom to choose.
“It seems like a lifetime ago and yet…”
“It’s always there. Right beneath the skin. Hidden from the world to see but impossible to outrun,” Jules said.
He was exactly right, though I didn’t need to confirm it. He’d admitted to running away from home, but he hadn’t meant escaping the city for a while or taking a break from any dysfunction in his life.
It ran deeper than that. So much deeper.
“The vet from the next town over was at Frank’s. When I saw her truck, I ran directly to Titan’s stall. He was… he was dead, and Frank was nowhere to be found. The vet told me that she’d gotten a call about Titan suffering from a severe bout of colic a couple hours earlier. When she got there, Titan was dead. He’d been shot in the head. She never saw Frank, but she said that he would have known how badly Titan was suffering. He probably knew there’d be no way to save his best friend, so rather than wait the additional time it took for the vet to get to his place, Frank put Titan down himself.”
Tears were stinging the backs of my eyes and my voice was catching, so I took a few breaths to calm myself down. Jules had linked his fingers with mine at some point, so I used that to ground me in the present.
“What happened to Frank?” Jules gently asked.
“The vet called the police so they could search for Frank, but I knew they wouldn’t find him. The gun he’d used to shoot Titan with was gone too. My guess is that after he shot Titan, Frank stood up and just started walking until the forest had hidden him away from the rest of the world. They never found his body, so I don’t know if he shot himself or if he just kept walking until he succumbed to the elements, but I knew that day that I’d never see him again.”
“I’m sorry, Flynn,” Jules whispered.
I responded by pressing a kiss to his temple. I didn’t have the emotional energy to respond in any other way. I hadn’t expected my own reaction when I’d started telling Jules about Frank and Titan.
I clung to Jules because he was my lifeline to the present, but admittedly, I mentally disappeared for a while because it once again took hearing Jules calling out my name repeatedly to get my attention.
“The sun’s coming up, Flynn,” he said softly. I wasn’t sure how Jules had even known that he’d gotten my attention, but it didn’t matter because I was once again where I needed to be.
I quickly took in our surroundings. Curtis and Brooks had a sizeable lead on us, but I knew we weren’t at risk of losing them. I gave BJ the soft command to speed up before saying to Jules, “We made it, sweetheart. We’re at the top.”