Chapter 26
We barely speak on the way back to the campsite.
Wes tries to talk, but I shut him down.
A part of me insists I’m overreacting—it wasn’t a lie, so much as a failure to share information—but the rest of me is already in lockdown. Finding out Wes is keeping things from me shouldn’t be scarier than having bats in my hair, but it is.
I was falling so hard for him, so hard that I’d let myself forget how much it hurt the first time he let secrets get between us.
Now, it all comes rushing back, making my head spin.
How much it hurt to learn the man I’d been making love to all night was in a relationship with another woman. How my heart shriveled in my chest when that break-up he’d promised didn’t come. How I wanted to jump through a wormhole to another dimension when I spotted Wes and Darcy at a table in my favorite café a few days after our night in the woods.
They didn’t look happy—not even close—but that didn’t matter. He’d still chosen her, not me.
It’s the story of my life.
For one reason or another, I am always the unchosen one.
If I were a character in a fantasy novel, I wouldn’t be the princess who learns she has magical powers or the slayer who has to save the world from zombies. I wouldn’t even be the spunky sidekick who assists the heroine with my encyclopedic knowledge of healing plants or weapons expertise. I’d be the mayor’s daughter who’s killed by bad guys in chapter three, a plot device to show how bad the bad guys are.
Back at the camper, I quickly clean up and change clothes, but when I cuddle Freya, she can obviously still smell that I’ve been getting up close and personal with other furry things. I endure her frantic sniffing of my hair patiently, wishing I had a similar skill set. If I could smell other women on my man, maybe lies wouldn’t feel like such a big deal.
But even as the thought drifts through my head, I know that’s not the real problem.
I’m not worried about Wes cheating. Maybe I should be, but I’m not. I believe that he’s falling for me as hard and fast as I’m falling for him, and that he clearly feels terrible about keeping Darcy’s texts from me—regret is etched in every tense line of his face as he emerges from his own clean-up in the bathroom.
I just want to be able to trust my person. I need that.
And I need to know that he trusts me. I can’t live with this kind of uncertainty, always wondering if I’m being told the whole truth, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Over time, even little white lies can come between two people, and Wes’s lies aren’t white. They’re an “I like to manipulate things behind the scenes without telling people” shade of gray.
At the Emergency Room, we learn we do indeed need to start the rabies vaccine protocol. Apparently, bat teeth are so tiny and sharp that we could have been bitten and not even know it. We’ll need to get one round of shots now, and then another shot at the three, seven, and fourteen days post exposure. The day three shots, we can get here at the hospital in Utah, the nurse says. Afterwards, she can send the vaccination records to our primary care providers in Bad Dog, so that we can finish the protocol when we’re home from our trip.
If we decide to stay the rest of the week.
Right now, that’s a big “if.”
I just want to go home. I want to crawl into bed with Freya, watch reruns of Gilmore Girls, and remember that even Lorelei Gilmore, a gorgeous, spunky, intelligent, hardworking woman, with a fantastic sense of humor and a heart as big as the burgers at Luke’s diner didn’t find her happily ever after until late in life.
I don’t have to commit to a future of ferret-nurturing spinsterhood. There’s still time for me to find my person. With time, I’ll forget the dazzling, magical, perfect way Wes made me feel. I’ll forget that he’s the only man who’s ever appreciated my goofy side as much as my sexy one, the only man who’s looked at me like I’m the answer to every question, the only man who’s ever felt like home.
“Can we talk? Please?” Wes asks from the door to the camper.
He ate the burger and fries we picked up on the way back to our campsite inside at the banquet. I ate out here by the fire, Freya cavorting on her leash beside my chair, gratefully snatching at the tiny pieces of meat I tossed her way.
Even after the exhausting day, I just wasn’t that hungry, and I still don’t want to talk. But I owe Wes that much.
I nod toward the other camp chair.
He settles into the seat, leaning forward with his elbows braced on his knees, his expression still drawn. “I have something to tell you.”
My brows lift.
After a beat, he continues, “I don’t want lies between us anymore, not even lies of omission. I understand why you’re upset, but honestly, Tessa, the last thing I’d ever want to do is hurt you. I just didn’t want to ruin the fun by bringing up Darcy’s texts. I was going to tell you, I swear. And now that I know how much things like this upset you, in the future, I would know to tell you right away.”
I sigh and cross my arms tighter over my chest.
“I’d be fine with you going through my phone if you wanted,” Wes adds, making me frown. “Whenever you wanted to.”
“I don’t want to go through your phone,” I say. “I just want to know I can trust you, Wes.”
He leans closer, his fingers threading together into a single fist. “And you can. I swear. I have nothing to hide.” He pauses, his teeth dragging over his full bottom lip. “Or…I won’t. Once I tell you one last thing.”
My stomach knots around what little food I managed to force down. “Okay,” I say, even though I’m not sure I want to hear his “one last thing.” I’m already struggling. I don’t know if I’ll be able to let my walls down and trust him again.
One more lie might be all it takes to put the nail in the coffin of this relationship.
“It’s about Carl,” he says, surprising me.
I sit back, blinking faster. “Carl? The man in the woods?”
Wes nods tightly. “A few days after he attacked you, I mentioned what happened to an old high school friend of mine who’s a cop. I was just wondering if I needed to come in and give a statement or something. But she said no one had reported anything like that. When I realized you hadn’t told the police about what happened, I thought about coming to talk to you, to try to convince you to come to the station with me.” He sighs, dragging a hand through his hair. “But then I started thinking about all the women I’ve represented in court, all those restraining orders that did jack shit to keep their abusive partners away from them. One of my clients ended up in the hospital with a broken jaw. Another…didn’t make it out of the relationship. She ended up going back to her abuser. He’d made it too scary for her to keep fighting for her freedom. Every time I see her in town, she looks smaller, more…hollow inside.”
He trails off, misery clear on his face.
I want to reach out to him, to pull him in for a hug and tell him how sorry I am that he has a front row seat to the worst aspects of humanity. But the hugging part of me is still locked away with the rest of the vulnerable emotions that ran for shelter when I read that text.
Instead, I hold out my fast-food bag. “My churro chunks are still in here. I couldn’t eat them.”
His lips twitch. “Thanks, I’m good.”
“Are you sure? Sugar makes everything better.”
“Maybe later. I have to get this out first. My stomach is in knots.”
“I get it.” I tuck the bag back in the side pocket of my camp chair and close the Velcro flap, keeping it safe from Freya, who is still prowling around the fire, looking for microscopic pieces of meat she might have missed.
Wes sighs. “So, yeah, I thought about all that and understood why you’d decided against reporting.”
“He didn’t really hurt me, Wes,” I say. “I mean, he did, obviously. I was terrified, and I have no doubt that he would have done very bad things to me if you hadn’t shown up. But he didn’t get to follow through on those things. In the eyes of the law, he was only guilty of roughing me up a little. That’s not enough to land him in prison or get him off the streets for any length of time. It’s only enough to make him even more angry and myself more of a target.”
He nods, his jaw tight. “I thought about that, too. Our system is so messed up. The fact that we have to wait until clearly violent people step over the line drives me crazy. So…” He clears his throat and blows out a long breath. “This is hard,” he mutters. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”
“Just tell me,” I say, my own stomach churning. “The suspense is worse than whatever you did.”
He glances up, arching a thick brow. “You want to bet?”
I let out a nervous laugh. “Jesus, you’re scaring me. What did you do? Kill him?”
He pauses just long enough to make the blood drain from my extremities before he says, “No, but I stalked him. Or, paid a private detective to stalk him for me, since I didn’t really have the time.”
My eyes bulge. “What?”
“He wasn’t an accountant, like he told you. He wasn’t from Redwood Falls, either. He was a janitor at a high school in Chicago.”
My jaw drops. “Chicago? But his location tracking said—”
“He must have been using a VPN or something to make it look like he was local,” Wes cuts in. “In reality, he lived with his mother in a bad neighborhood in South Shore and had a reputation for being a creep. The police knew he wasn’t quite right, but they were busy dealing with gangs and drug dealers. Carl had never done anything bad enough to get more than a ticket for trespassing and a strongly worded warning to quit lurking outside the girls’ locker room at the YMCA.”
“Gross,” I say, my nose wrinkling.
“Yeah.” Wes pauses, unlacing and relacing his fingers, his gaze shifting to the fire as he adds, “He was gross, but he wasn’t doing anything criminal. Not anything we could use to get him locked up, anyway. Not until my guy realized he hadn’t brought groceries home in close to three weeks.”
I frown. “Is that a crime? If so, I might be guilty. Sometimes I go weeks without hitting the store. I live on leftovers from catering events, frozen soup, and fancy oatmeal.”
“He wasn’t bringing home leftovers, either. And his house didn’t look like the kind of place where people were freezing soup or whipping up batches of oatmeal, if you know what I mean,” he says, his gaze still locked on the fire. “It was a hunch, really. The PI and I both felt in our gut that something was wrong in there. We suspected his mother, a shut-in who’d had several strokes, was probably being abused.”
“Oh no,” I say, feeling terrible for the woman. Monsters like Carl usually aren’t raised by sweet little homemakers, but no one deserves to be trapped or forced to go hungry.
Wes gives a short nod. “Yeah. But…it was worse than we thought.”
My hand comes to cover my mouth, my sinking gut already knowing where this is headed.
“She’d been dead for a while,” he adds. “And not from natural causes. Apparently, he’d choked her and left the body in the back room so he could keep collecting her social security and disability payments. The cop who did the welfare check said the smell was horrific.”
“Oh God.” I suck in a breath that catches halfway down my throat. “Oh my God, Wes. Why haven’t I heard about this? Was it on the news?”
He shrugs and tosses a few more sticks on the fire. “Chicago’s far away. And a lot of bad things happen in big cities. The news can’t report on everything.”
I sit back in my chair, stunned. “Wow. So, is he…”
“He’s in jail awaiting trial. But it’ll be a slam dunk. He’s going away for a long time. You won’t have to worry about him showing up in your life again.” Wes looks up from the flames, his gaze uncertain. “I hope that didn’t make you hate me more. I was only trying to keep you safe.”
My chest aching, I shake my head. “I don’t hate you. I could never hate you.”
“But you don’t trust me,” he says, his gaze still sad. “And why should you? You’re right. I’m a liar.” He rubs a hand at the back of his neck. “I’ve always thought of it as sharing information on a need-to-know basis or keeping my private business private, but…withholding is a form of lying. Even if you have someone’s best interests at heart.”
Biting my lip, I think over everything’s he’s said, everything he’s done. When I take a step back to look at the big picture, it’s suddenly clear what they all have in common. “It’s part of being the ‘nice one’ in your family, isn’t it? You keep secrets to keep the peace.”
His brows lift, but after a moment, he nods. “I guess so. But I promise, I mean well. I honestly do.”
“But you also want to be able to do what you want without facing the consequences. Or hearing everyone else’s opinions about your choices.”
His lips press together. “That, too.”
“It’s hard to change lifelong habits,” I say softly.
His gaze locks with mine. “It would be way fucking harder to lose you.” Uncertainty creeps into his expression. “But I guess in order to do that, I would have had to have had you in the first place.”
The backs of my eyes sting as I whisper, “You had me. You have me. You stalked the man who hurt me until you got him thrown in jail, Wes. Is that crazy? Yes. Super crazy.” I swallow past the lump in my throat. “But it’s also the most wonderful thing anyone has ever done for me.”
“I would do it again in a heartbeat,” he promises. “But next time, I’d tell you first. I swear to you, Tessa. No more secrets between us, no more withholding information, no more trying to control the narrative. From now on, I’m committed to transparency. Even when it’s hard.”
I nod, my stomach sinking again as I remember all the other roadblocks in our way. “I believe you, but…are you sure about this, Wes? Are you sure you want to hitch your wagon to a woman six years older than you are for the long haul? I mean, even if things work out perfectly, I can’t give you children.”
“I don’t know if I can have biological children, either. I’ve never tried.” He shifts his chair closer to mine, until our knees touch and relief prickles across my skin. I wasn’t sure I would ever touch him again. Even this small contact feels like being pulled back from the edge of a terrible fall. “That doesn’t mean we can’t be a family,” he continues, curling his hands around the backs of my knees. “The two of us. Together. With Freya. That’s a family. And if we decide someday that we have a baby-shaped hole in our hearts, we can adopt.” He shrugs. “Or maybe we’ll be happy being the cool aunt and uncle and spending our free time out in the woods doing things people with kids don’t have time to do.”
“Like having kinky sex in our tent and eating marshmallows for breakfast?” I ask, the tension between us taking on a different quality as he leans in.
“You haven’t seen kinky yet, Lady Gray,” he whispers. “There are still so many things I want to do to you. With you. Will you still be my girl?”
Biting my bottom lip, I nod, my smile stretching wide at the happiness that blooms on his face. “Yes, I will,” I say, laughing as Freya pops up between us, her face poking through our knees. “I think Freya wants to be your girl, too.”
“I think she wants the food in the pocket of your chair,” he says, as she crawls over my thigh and up to my hip, reaching over to paw at the Velcro.
I smile. “I think she wants both. A girl can have her churro bites and true love, too. I mean, unless you’re a ferret and can’t eat things like that without getting sick.”
His expression sobers. “True love, huh?”
“I’m getting there,” I whisper, hopeful wings fluttering in my chest.
His grip tightens on the backs of my knees, sending electrical pulses flowing up my thighs. “Me, too. Can I take you inside and show you how close I am?”
I nod, my every cell flooded with longing as his fingers thread through mine.
After tucking Freya into her crate—the better to keep her from ripping my chair apart for forbidden treats or sneaking in to watch things she shouldn’t—we come together in the dark, his lips on mine and his hands everywhere.
And it’s even better than before, because there’s nothing between us but the truth of how much we both want this to work.
“Ouch,” I hiss, wincing as I toss my shirt to the floor, sending pain flashing through my injection site.
“Should we take it easy?” Wes asks, pausing on his path toward the bed.
“Never.” I thread my fingers in his hair, pulling him down for another hard kiss that he returns with an intensity that banishes the hint of discomfort.
It banishes everything but the need to have him inside me.
On the bed, I push him back on the mattress and tear at his clothes, freeing his cock and stroking him up and down, loving the groan my touch wrenches from the back of his throat. Shifting to one side, I quickly pull off my leggings and underwear, before straddling him again.
“Yes,” Wes says, cupping my breasts in his hands as I lean over him, bracing myself on the pillows beneath his head. “I like you like this, on top of me with your breasts in my face.” He lifts his head, dragging his tongue back and forth across my nipples, teasing them both before he settles in to suck my right nipple deep into his mouth.
Breath already coming fast, I grind against his erection, coating him with my arousal before nudging him into place with a wiggle of my hips. There’s a hint of resistance as I sink down, but that feels good, too, the way he stretches me, filling every empty inch.
“Fuck, Tessa,” he breathes, lifting his hips, forcing his cock just a few centimeters deeper. “You feel so good, but you really suck at foreplay.”
“You suck at foreplay,” I say, moaning as he pinches my nipples, sending a fresh shock of arousal straight to my core.
“No, I don’t,” he says.
“No, you don’t,” I agree, beginning to ride him in earnest. “But I don’t need foreplay all the time. Sometimes I just need you, inside me, showing me that you feel it, too.”
“I feel it, too,” he assures me. “It’s perfect. You’re perfect.”
“We’re perfect.” I rock my hips, taking him deep again, shifting the angle until the head of his erection brushes against that electric spot inside. “Yes, oh, yes. Right there.”
“Yes,” he says, still rubbing and squeezing my breasts with one hand as he reaches down to grip my ass hard with the other. “Just like that. Ride your cock, baby. Ride me until you come all over me. I love how wet you are, how you take what you need from me. Fuck, yes, Tessa, I can feel you going. Fuck, baby.”
I come with a wild cry, losing control—and my rhythm—as fierce waves of pleasure pulse through me. But that’s okay. Wes takes over, gripping my bottom with both hands and moving me up and down on his hard, hot length.
He isn’t gentle and half the words spilling from his lips are too foul for polite company, but I love every second of it. By the time he comes with a deep groan, lifting me off the mattress as he thrusts up and into me one last time, I’m at the edge again.
I come again, cursing and whimpering and telling him how much I love him and his dirty mouth.
“Love it,” I pant again. “Love what a filthy talker you are.”
“And I love feeling your come all over my thighs.”
I lift my head and arch a brow. “That isn’t all mine, buddy.”
He grins. “I also love not using condoms. You’ve ruined me for all other women, Lady Gray.”
“Good,” I say, giggling when he gently swats my ass. I sink back onto his chest with a sigh. “Let’s always fuck like filthy bunnies, okay? Even when we’re old and tired and I have arthritis in my hips and you have trouble getting it up?”
“Never going to have that problem,” he says. “Not with you.”
And then he proves it by nailing me against the wall in the tiny bathroom before we shower, and it is…the happiest ending to the craziest day ever.
Bar none.