Chapter 15
Daisy
The last forty minutes blurred into a fog until Max helped me into his truck. A haze of sad looks, understanding hugs, and offers of support—all of which I was grateful for, but nothing that surmounted the brief but memorable exchange Max had with his brother.
“What did Nox mean?” I asked as we drove down the long drive, the light rain tapping the windshield like sharp fingernails on the top of a desk, waiting for his answer too.
Max didn’t tense. He was tense since the moment he’d started the engine. He knew this was coming. He knew I wouldn’t just let it go.
“Don’t worry about him. He’s just dealing with some stuff that happened before he went to Italy, and he projects onto others,” Max offered, and while it explained some, it didn’t answer my question.
“I meant, why did he ask if you were moving back out of your dad’s?
Is that where you’re living?” Was it really any of my business?
Last week, I would’ve convinced myself no, but now…
now, he was my husband. Whatever the reason and for however long, we’d sworn for better or for worse, and if there was a way I could be there for him in even a fraction of the way he’d been there for me over the last month, I was going to take it.
“Daisy—”
“I won’t judge you, Max. How can I judge you? My life is in shambles. I was stood up on my wedding day, my first one, and now I’m living out of your apartment—”
“Yes, it’s where I’m living right now,” he interrupted, and I cut off my self-deprecating ramble because he was answering me. “And no, I’m not worried about you judging me, Daze.”
“Why didn’t you just stay at your house until it sells?” Something wasn’t adding up, but when I looked to Max, the only thing I could see was the catch of the moonlight on the hard planes of his profile.
“It was easier,” he grunted. “House stays nice for showings. Honestly, I thought it would sell faster, so it seemed easier to move out when I had the opportunity and not have to worry about it later.”
I let those words sink into my head. Maybe I should let them be the end of the conversation. I had my answer. I had an answer I was comfortable with. But I knew Max well enough to know when he was giving me enough of the truth to satisfy me yet spare me at the same time.
“So you left your own home to move back in with your dad?” When he didn’t answer right away, I continued, “Why is Nox upset about that?”
“He’s not. He just wants to give me a hard time.”
“Because of me,” I finished what I knew he wouldn’t say. “Because you’re helping me.”
“No, that’s not—”
“Then tell me what it is, if it’s not that, because that’s the only thing that makes sense.” His knuckles were white on the steering wheel as he turned onto the highway toward Stonebar. “He’s upset you’re helping me…upset you married me to help me. It’s okay.”
“Dammit, Daze. That’s not the reason.” Max huffed and pried one hand off the steering wheel to run through his hair.
“Then tell me what it is. Stop treating me like I’m too fragile to handle the truth.”
“Fine,” he growled. “Nox is giving me a hard time because I was staying in the apartment before moving back in with Dad.”
His answer hit like a wrecking ball.
“The apartment…you mean the apartment you’re renting to me? The one you told me no one was using?” Shock and anger surged inside me like fire and ice.
“Well, I wasn’t really using it. I was only there temporarily.” Max slowed the truck and cranked the wipers up to full blast, but I wasn’t seeing the storm.
I was seeing the boxes of clothes. All his things he’d cleaned out the following day, insisting he’d been using the space as an office. How had I not realized?
Because no matter how deep Max planted himself in my life, there were whole chunks of his that he kept hidden from me.
I lifted my hand to my throat, feeling the drum of my pulse along my fingers and the way it matched the incessant batter of the rain on the windshield.
“Max, you were living in it. I think that’s the definition of using it,” I said, my voice strangled between the urge to laugh and the overwhelming tide to cry.
Max didn’t move back home because he was selling his house. He moved back home in order to give me the apartment. And if that wasn’t enough, he’d gone and married me so I could have good health insurance. No wonder Nox was annoyed.
“Fine, I was using it, and when you needed a place, I decided I didn’t need to use it anymore.” He shrugged it off like he’d loaned me a pen and not his own living space.
The rain lightened again like we were reaching the edge of the cloud, and my back pressed into the seat as Max picked up a little speed again.
“No.” I shook my head. “You don’t get to do that. I asked you—”
“And if I told you the truth, you never would’ve accepted it, no matter how not big of a deal it was.”
Not big of a deal…
“I wouldn’t have accepted it because it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do—to kick you out of your own place so I wouldn’t have to deal with my reality,” I fired at him, the air in the truck cab suddenly charged as though all the nerves that had built all day, worried about how his family might react, now caught like gunpowder set on fire by the realization that… “You lied to me, Max.”
“No, I didn’t—”
“You didn’t tell me the whole truth. It’s the same thing.”
“Dammit, Daze—Shit!” Max shouted, his arm swinging in front of me as he slammed on the brakes.
The tires screeched, his truck sliding on the freshly slicked fallen leaves on the road. I cried out when the back tires swung off the edge of the asphalt, bouncing the whole vehicle as they landed on the gravel shoulder, and we finally came to a halt.
My chest heaved, my arms locked around my middle. I stared out the front windshield at the doe and her baby, who’d darted into the road in front of Max.
They were the reason he’d slammed on the brakes.
“Daisy?”
I heard him, but it was at a distance. As though I were frozen in a block of ice and Max was calling to me outside it.
“Daisy, are you all right?”
Slowly, my gaze lowered, taking stock of myself. I willed my arms to move, but they wouldn’t. They refused to let go of the baby even though we were safe.
I started to shake, the surge of adrenaline now flooding my system.
“Shit.” I wanted to look at him, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t take my eyes off the doe in the middle of the wet, leaf-covered road, standing like the proverbial deer in headlights.
She’d run into the road after her fawn. To protect it. She’d run right in front of the charging truck and now was just as paralyzed as I was.
You’re okay, I wanted to tell her. He’d never hurt you.
The passenger door opened, and the movement spurred the deer out of her trance.
“Daisy.” Max’s voice was on the other side of me now, and the deer jerked her gaze to him, and then bounded off the side of the road and into the woods, her baby close behind her.
“Daisy…” Max took my shoulder in his hand and rested the other on top of mine, where it lay over my stomach. I let out the exhale that had gone stale from sitting held in my lungs and slowly turned to him.
Rain dripped onto him, stringing my gaze along with each droplet.
From the wet waves of his hair to the hard crease of his brow to the ridge of his cheekbones, I let myself look at him in the way I’d only stolen glances of before.
I let myself linger on the warm amber of his eyes, the taut curve of his jaw, and the tight bow of his mouth…
I could only imagine what that mouth would do to a woman. I could only imagine what that mouth would do to me.
“Are you okay?”
Physically or psychologically? Physically, I was fine. But the way I wanted to kiss him right now…psychologically, that didn’t bode well.
“I think so…” The words were hardly out before my seatbelt was unclipped and strong hands shaped my waist, somehow making me feel small as he spun me like a doll in the seat.
If Max heard my gasp, he didn’t register it. Meanwhile, all I could register was how his characteristically calm face had turned to granite. His warm eyes were now the gradient of hot metal, cool and dark in the center and hot and glowing on the edges.
“Are you sure?” His molten gaze, and then his big hands, roamed over me. Well, not over the parts that ached for him. Unfortunately. But over my arms and shoulders. He framed my chin in the V between his thumb and forefinger, turning my head side to side. “The baby?”
“She’s fine.” My fingers grazed low on my stomach, feeling her move. “We’re fine. I promise.”
He clenched his jaw, fighting to accept it for a second. “I’m sorry. The deer came out of nowhere.”
“Don’t apologize, Max,” I rushed to stop him. “It’s not your fault. She was just worried about her baby…”
As I trailed off into silence, our eyes remained tangled, his searching for danger, and mine, a space to ask for forgiveness.
He’d never hurt you. The thought I’d had for the momma deer now circled back for me.
No, Max hadn’t told me the whole truth, but he was right. If he had, I wouldn’t have taken the apartment. I would’ve gone back to the city, to my crappy apartment, which would’ve exponentially increased the stress of the situation and of my future.
Maybe he should’ve told me the whole truth, but maybe I needed to stop pushing help away on principle.
He’d never hurt you.
Max would never hurt me. Never.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my deep exhale dragging my head down between my shoulders. “You’re right, I wouldn’t have listened if I knew you were living there. I’m not good at…being helped.”
I’d been hurt enough times—and warned about being hurt just as many—that I’d poured tar into the cracks of my heart and then dipped the whole thing in steel, determined not to let anyone close enough to break it.
But Max didn’t give me a choice. He was just there with everything I wanted.
Everything I needed. Eroding all my defenses.