Chapter 8
8
MARI
Conversation carried on around me as I finished my regular morning waffles. After six weeks of Alan serving me the things on a daily basis at my best count—though I hadn’t been game to mark out a calendar on Robe’s walls or risk asking for one or a phone—I thought I might start to look like a waffle. I ignored the snippets that offered a sweet reprieve from the dark thoughts tangling me up in their knotted strands, luring me back to the darkness.
Never again.
The waffles were my comfort food. I needed that, as my period hadn’t turned up yet. And being six weeks late, whether the absence was stress related or not, terrified me of the repercussions. Alan knew; I hadn’t brought it up with anyone else. He seemed my best and most likely advocate, the one least likely to hit the panic button.
The day after I mentioned my quandary, a pregnancy test found its way into my sweater collection. I didn’t ask how, but the negative result left me relieved, though I still worried at a low level.
And so…waffles.
After losing myself in Robe’s protective embrace and doing my best to sandbox my head in an excess of mountain-man energy time and again, my days blurred, each running into the next. I was determined not to let it happen again while I remained in his house, intent on preserving the slim pickings of my sanity. Vagueness became my constant retreat from the world, from everyone. Including myself.
Focus, Mari. Go home. Be safe.
But I didn’t have a home I could go back to, which meant nowhere was safe for me. Except right here. The haven Robe offered with open arms and a guarded smile, though Will made that easier when he produced a pretty sundress with the tag still attached and a pink knitted cardigan so soft I swore I could sleep in it. Not a word passed his lips as he handed over the present, not reacting to my open-mouthed stare, and then left the cabin with long strides while Alan watched on from behind the bar, a broad grin covering his face.
“Go on. He wants to see it on,” the bartender encouraged.
I gestured with my free hand toward the open door. “But he’s not here.”
Alan sent me a knowing smile. “He’ll see you.”
I took him at his word and changed. Will must have seen and liked what he saw, because the day after, a few more dresses and knits arrived in my bedroom. Now I wore them snow day or no snow day, and it also helped that the fireplace off to one side of the kitchen roared all day long regardless of the weather.
After finishing my daily quota of waffles, I scraped my chair back, got up, and edged through the throng of males that occupied the small living area that was not at all big enough to contain their combined mass and testosterone. The food and whiskey had done almost as much for me as the enforced rest of these past weeks. I understood the unspoken solo assignment. Sleep, heal, repeat.
But I wasn’t a princess, and Robe’s hard bed had no pea beneath the mattress.
I moved among the men, hesitating when fingertips or elbows brushed my skin, but the touches weren’t intentional. No one grabbed at me or hindered my progress. They wanted me to eat waffles, so waffles, I would.
I knew I should reestablish a new normal even if my facade masked my pain because right now, I needed to function in the face of a household full of strange men.
Strange as in odd. Not all of them remained unknowns in my heart, which fell under a separate category of odd altogether—though they seemed the safer option as opposed to… out there, where the police couldn’t help me because my boss’s bosom buddy was the most powerful man in NYC. I did my best to face that reality, but denial offered such a pretty distraction.
I took another step forward and managed to draw the attention of everyone in the cabin. Alan’s gaze lightened as he looked up from where he spoke with Will and Miller, the barrel-chested man who still glared at me.
I dropped my eyes too fast and cursed myself. Gripping the plate between whitened fingertips, which made the whole thing shake rather than prevent its tremor, I placed the crockery on the counter, then lined the cutlery up in a neat stack. I didn’t just seek denial. Anything that could whisk away the dreamlike memory wraiths that taunted me from the edges of my vision with their nightmarish touch was welcome.
If I screamed, would anyone hear me? A philosophical question about downed trees and woodsmen crossed my mind, and the room shrank.
Robe and Jon stood off to one side, speaking in quiet tones. The latter’s shirt stuck to his skin, transparent with sweat. Tiny tears decorated his cloth-covered arms. He took off earlier, as appeared to be his habit, and had come back sweating. I wasn’t sure what Jon did out there, but he couldn’t look at me when he returned. Whatever strange family unit Robe had put together, I screwed with it just by being here.
And yet a desperate, torn part of me wished Jon had taken me with him.
Where Robe presented himself as a hardworking, controlled specimen of strength, Jon’s wilder nature won out in his tangled, untrimmed beard and hair, the unkempt button-down shirt in contrast to Robe’s pressed wardrobe.
My fingers twitched at my sides, itching to pick the debris from Jon’s beard, but the giant’s presence consumed as much energy as he expelled. Together, he and Robe formed an impenetrable barrier, locking me out when, for whatever stupid reason my chaotic thoughts chose to fixate on, I wanted into their combined space.
I closed my eyes and listened, and the same voice that had been soothing me since my hell-mad dash through his woods worked again. When I opened them, Alan stood in front of me, dancing. His sinuous turns and undulations would have earned him a rabid fandom on socials, but from what I’d learned about Robe and his men, they hid the things that made them each so unique and formidable. A small smile broke through my chaotic headspace.
Alan never stopped dancing.
At the back of the cabin, someone thumped the floorboards in a deep, heartwarming beat, drawing the lithe man into a series of twisting turns that caught the eye. The interior space filled with harsh claps and a pounding tempo suited to the mountains around us, tribal and rhythmic, that stopped my mind from going back to?—
Fingers prodding, pushing, pulling, twisting ? —
No.
Would I end up joining the ranks of Robe’s hidden world? The thought flip-flopped my stomach, but as I watched Alan dance, devoured the flirtatious movements, the secret smile he offered as a quiet intimacy in an overcrowded room, the fear of an unknown future drifted away.
“Thank you,” I murmured when he halted in front of me, conscious of the ball of energy Will created that thrummed on my other side, though the young man remained still. “That was amazing.”
Something darker and far more formidable replaced his bouncing energy. I didn’t have to turn around to know that Robe stood behind me.
“Good to know my efforts are appreciated.” Alan grinned, though his sparkling eyes conveyed something else to Robe in a silent conversation they held without including me.
Robe’s palm came down hard on the benchtop. I flinched, backing up by pure instinct—right into the wall of the man who’d caused the reaction. Alan’s eyes narrowed, but he backed off, both hands raised, palms out in surrender, though he flicked a reassuring look my way.
A light touch grazed my hip as Robe locked his forearms against the bar on either side of me, leaning forward to prevent my turning to face him. He stared at me through the reflection in the mirror that sat behind the top-shelf bottles, the rare sort he preferred to stock.
“Tell me where you came from, Mari.” Robe renewed his interrogation with a sweet voice, his demeanor so different from when he battered the counter with his open hand.
The switch in him was instantaneous, though I had wondered how long it would be before his voice hardened, belying his kind tone. After all, these men didn’t live out here in the middle of nowhere for no good reason. They hid from the world, or maybe the world hid from them. Either way, the words, his or mine, needed to come out for that to happen, and I already tried that while I dressed in the borrowed clothes he provided. My protector. My interrogator.
I saw him as a threat to my safety. He saw me as a threat to everything and everyone he held close.
He might be right.
I opened my mouth and replied with a gurgling mess I had no intention of repeating any time soon. “You could have tracked my trail back through the woods. From the damage I inflicted on those poor trees, I clearly didn’t bother trying to hide it. I was just intent on getting out.” That was enough to start the shivers again.
I shut my explanation down, biting my lip. He wanted an answer, a reaction, and he got one. I shrugged my apology, but how else did one run for their life? Concealment hadn’t been my intent; distance and survival were my sole aim. I sucked on the metal tang that flooded my mouth from my split lip, giving myself permission to shut up.
“We did.” Robe’s voice brought me back. “Several times to be certain. Your tracks disappeared in the middle of nowhere. You managed to carve up my section of the woods. There was a disturbed patch, then nothing. Like you were meant to end up here. Miller is an expert tracker. If he can’t figure out where you came from, there’s something wrong.”
“It was like you fell out of the sky and landed right near us. An angelic delivery.” Miller’s eyes accused me of some unknown crime, but his haughty tone prevented my disjointed explanation from flowing from between tight lips.
Something about the way he posed, displaying a degree of entitlement the others lacked, though several had a military bearing…. I frowned, turning over what made his glare so out of place in this crew of muscle-bound misfits. It had been bugging me the whole time I’d existed in their living space, flying under the radar.
Miller jeered, his lip curling. There it was, in the tilt of his chin, the narrowed judgment in sharp eyes that missed little. Everyone else in the cabin reeked of genuine hard work, and though I didn’t doubt for one second that he did his share, Miller’s demeanor included something the rest lacked.
Privilege.
“Private school boy?” I asked, still studying him, and knew I’d called it right.
His mannerisms told the story for him: the way he threw his shoulders back, how he stormed about like he owned the place. All he lacked was the sports car and a doting mother on call.
Robe laughed, his chest rumbling behind my head, and reached out to clap Miller’s shoulder in a blow that had to sting. Miller’s whole body rocked forward.
He glared at me for a moment longer. “What, you’re a shrink now? Is that what you’re here to do?”
I blinked. “I beg your pardon?” My accent thickened when I got cranky, but it earned me a grin from Robe’s reflection.
At least his interrogation had stopped, though Miller’s had taken its place.
“I think he wants to know how you turned up in my woods, right on top of us, when there’s no trail and no proof that you came from anywhere at all.” Robe’s tone remained conversational, though his gaze roamed over my body that bore the marks put there by too many assailants for even me to count.
And I tried—in my dreams every night.
Phantoms of invisible hands traced over my body beneath my borrowed clothes. I jerked, resisting the urge to rake my nails over my skin and peel the sensation free. Unable to bring out my crazy when my mind sent out a warning signal that this was not the sort of conversation I wanted to vague out on, I settled for wrapping my arms tight around my body.
“I don’t know what you mean.” I twisted away as if he stung me, but the veiled accusation ripped at the safety net of my new future.
An unknown future, which left me in a forbidden space. Tears prickled my eyes. I inhaled too fast and swallowed a mouthful of mountain man. Any other day, that would have been hilarious.
I’d spent hours talking myself into being able to trust Robe while I lay in his bed or stared at myself in the mirror in his bathroom before I emerged. My body still bore the marks of my abuse, though the bruises had yellowed and faded from their original dark splotches. Inside? That looked… different. Worse. Invisible parts of me I hadn’t known I cherished were tainted with dark desires that weren’t mine but had left their stain all the same.
Until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that Robe and his men needed reassurance that they could trust me too.
We all had demons that followed us, though theirs were much older than mine.
I wanted to scream at the injustice of it, that I had been the one betrayed and abused. Hunted until nothing more remained of the prior girl who’d borne my face than a pathetic animal craving absolution for a crime it didn’t know it had committed.
But as I stared around at the small circle of men, that same sense of pain flitted through every pair of eyes, their demons not so different to my own.
“I had to drop off things at my b—at a place down the mountain,” I started, cautious of releasing any details.
I had no idea why I kept trying to protect a life no longer mine to claim or refused to give more information. I needed to keep some trump card for a dire moment that might sink or save me. For all I knew, they were friends with Gideon, and I’d be tossed back into his home. Numbness started at my toes and worked upward at that thought. But another part of me told me I could trust Robe… and I was back where I started, ready to tear my hair out and face the cabin en masse as a bald woman.
What the hell. I can’t be more broken than I already am.
No, just dead.
A heavy silence blanketed the cabin, blocking off the rest of the world from me, or maybe me from it. Which shook me deeper, until I struggled to continue.
“You know, the expensive-looking house that has the luxury European cars parked around it, the sort that never gets dirty on an unpaved road. I made my delivery. My b—Gi—he asked me to stay to help with some entertainment.” I hiccupped a laugh. “I didn’t know that meant me.”
“Oh, sweetcheeks.” Alan reached across the counter to clasp my hand. Understanding gleamed dully in place of the sparkle that I wanted, needed to fill his eyes, and already I missed its comforting presence.
I took the offering, squeezing his cold fingers. Alan’s perception grounded me, gave me the clarity to plow on. “The man I trusted led me into a room full of people. Men. A table stood in the middle. Ropes and leather straps hung loose from it, and there was a dark stain in the center, though the thing looked like it had been scrubbed clean. Maybe. He’d created a… a torture room, with tools and other implements on the walls. Not some play dungeon with canes and whips you might expect in an online show. All razor edges, spears and needle-sharp knives. We never got to those.” I choked up, shudders returning to shake me head to toe.
I drew in a deep breath, aiming for something fortifying, and managed a pathetic death rattle as Robe gripped my other hand.
“Why did they stop?” he asked.
Robe kept his voice soft, but it failed to disguise the undercurrent of violence he promised for reasons of his own, a history that predated my tumble into his life. The air stilled, but whatever he felt wasn’t aimed at me.
“I don’t know. Everyone left in a hurry. They bundled me into a ball of cloth and dumped me in the trunk of a car. New car smell will make me sick forever. Then they lifted me out. Two men carried me. More, maybe? Too many hands.” I tried to look up at him but instead squeezed my eyes shut, blocking out the sensations that assailed my body as if I still lay tethered to the table.
Conversations erupted above and around me as though I were no more than an object to be discarded. A nuisance. A puzzle to be solved.
Robe stroked along my spine, removed the phantom hands touching me, but I couldn’t quite quash the feelings, too high on the adrenaline that had flushed my system anew. His breath against my neck warmed me. I sent him a grateful glance, though my words stalled. I tried to make them come out but gagged instead.
“Think, Mari. What happened? Where did they take you?” Robe murmured.
My heart pounded, sweat breaking out on my arms, leaving me flushed and chilled at once. “Someone tossed me into the air, and I landed on the ground. I didn’t look around. Then all my wrappings were pulled away. I lay there, bare… naked. They stripped me of everything. Then they moved away, and I ran. I didn’t look back. I ran,” I repeated, desperate, for some ridiculous reason, for the men surrounding me to believe my story.
Desperate for acceptance.
Alan squeezed my other hand to the point of numbness, but I didn’t care. The tears that streamed down his face matched the ones that glazed my cheeks.
“You know him? The man who did this to you?” Robe extracted my hand from Alan, taking both of mine in his larger, work-roughened paws. He rubbed gentle circles over my skin, his fingers moving in a slow rhythm that matched my short breaths until they lengthened.
“Yes,” I croaked, jerking my head in a half nod, unable to say more.
“Good girl,” he murmured, drawing me closer. “Does he know where you work?”
All the questions that should have been asked and answered long ago but weren’t because we orbited around each other, playing house and being too fucking nice.
I hiccupped a laugh that cracked and died a horrible death. “Yes.”
“Where you live?”
“Yes.”
Robe drew me into his arms, folding a wall of muscle and determination around me. “Shit.”
“Yeah.” I pressed my cheek to his chest, seeking the steady beat of his heart that had become the metronome I lived by.
We stood like that for an eternity. Some immeasurable time later, I clung to him when he lifted me in a gentle grip, cradling me to his chest as he walked me through the small house and into his bedroom.
My breaths timed to the regular, strong throb of his heart, I took comfort in the strength he offered. He’d been there when I crashed, and despite his questioning, I didn’t fear him for that, for wanting to keep what he’d built safe. For wanting to protect me and those he loved.
Robe settled me on his bed, tucking the covers around me with care and a tender touch. He brushed a lingering kiss over my temple and started to rise.
I closed my fingers around his arm—the part of it I could grasp—panic rolling over me. “Stay. Please.”
Robe’s gaze shuttered in the semidarkness, and he squeezed my hand. “I’m here. Jon and I, we used to—” he started, then broke off, swearing.
“And you tell me I have a potty mouth,” I murmured, unwilling to scare him away.
He laughed darkly. “You do have a potty mouth, Mari Merripen.” He perched on the side of the bed, stroking my hair back, tracing light fingertips over my cheeks. With every action, he maintained the same slow rhythm, never rushed. He always asked permission with his hands, a dipped head before he pushed a boundary or tested my limits.
I can trust him. I can trust him. I can trust him.
Drawing in a long breath, I surrendered to his ministrations. “Tell me what you were going to say,” I whispered. Tell me a story with a happy ending. “Please.”
Robe hesitated for a breath before he resumed touching me, his strokes smooth and easy like I might have imagined the hitch. The need to commit my safety to someone else while I escaped from the fluttering hands drove my panic higher.
My tears started again at his gentle touch. He gathered me against him, sliding his body beneath mine to pillow my head against his shoulder. His body surrounded me. Our legs tangled together as I found a comfortable spot curled against his ribs, supported by his strong arms and the tender touch of a roughened mountain man.
“I was going to tell you that once upon a time, two men knew a woman they both loved. More than once, actually. But it didn’t work out, no matter how hard they tried. But they wanted to share everything they cared for.”
“Did they ever find what they were looking for?” I asked sleepily, covering a yawn.
“Not yet.” Robe curved his fingers behind me head and squeezed gently. “Sleep, Mari. I won’t leave you.”
“Maybe you could share me too,” I mumbled, not really listening to what I said as I drifted away. I tried to cling to him, the room, but I was too tired. Slipping.
“Maybe,” he whispered.
Or maybe I imagined that too.
Humming a folksy tune I didn’t recognize, Robe lulled me to sleep in a heady mix of dulled terror and growing trust of a door that maybe opened both ways.