Chapter Eight – Letter to a Friend
Chapter Eight
Beckett
LETTER TO A FRIEND
Performed by Bon Jovi
TEN YEARS AGO
HIM: I bought a Stephen King book today. Bring the popcorn, and we’ll see if this one can actually scare us silly.
HER: No can do. I’m spending the night with Fallon. We’re working on our routines for the Fourth of July show.
HIM: We haven’t read anything together in a long time. Are you avoiding me?
HER: *** eye-roll emoji*** Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve been busy with your summer semester, and I’ve been busy helping out at the ranch.
HIM: I miss my Maisey-girl.
HER: Stop by Jack’s, and you’ll be swarmed with at least a dozen females willing to be my stand-in.
HIM: No one can take your place, Maise. You’re irreplaceable.
PRESENT DAY
Maisey’s eyes were flashing as she paced.
Fury, frustration, and responsibility all mixed into a potent cocktail that I thought might just explode.
It was better than the glazed, what-the-hell-just-happened look she’d had when she’d shown up at her dad’s house—the look most fire victims had when we arrived at the scene of a residential fire.
But I’d gladly take the fury over the blank face she’d gotten good at showing me lately. The one she’d shown just now in her dad’s hospital room.
As she flew back and forth over the sidewalk, the fading sunlight surrounded her, and I swore it cast a halo around her. She shimmered and sparkled with a crusading angel-type glow.
Instead of a yellow sundress tempting me as it had last night, it was how her small, tantalizing curves were on display in her riding outfit.
Curves that made me crave things I’d never wanted before last night.
Impossible things. Like how she would feel wrapped around me in the middle of the night…
Hell, the middle of the day. Any time of day.
Fuck.
I had to get a grip on this new obsession.
Because those thoughts, the places my brain and body went just as she was drowning, proved exactly why I wasn’t cut out for a relationship.
Not with her. Not with anyone. Here she was, stressed and hurting, and I was thinking about what she’d sound like if I were deep inside her.
Disgust filled me.
I was a bastard.
A selfish bastard who’d done things to her today she didn’t even know about yet.
The lie I’d told Delilah.
The evidence I’d handed over to Ron.
I’d debated for longer than I should have about calling Ron after I’d found the empty Sterno can sitting next to what was left of her dad’s stove.
Ron trusted me to make the call on most cases, and I could have just pretended I hadn’t seen it.
But if it ever came out that I’d hidden evidence in a fire, my career would be over.
Forget the job as fire chief, forget any firefighting career.
And I couldn’t save Maisey’s dad at the cost of my future.
As Maisey paced by me once again, I caught her arm to stop her.
She resisted my touch just like she had in the hospital, but this time, I refused to back off.
I just yanked her to me. She put a hand out to slow the collision of our bodies.
The heat of her palm burned through my chest, settling over the cold heart that beat beneath it and zapping it with the strength of a defibrillator.
“If he loses the house, that’s on him,” I said. “You don’t owe him a goddamn thing.”
Lewis Campbell hadn’t completely fallen apart after his wife died, but he hadn’t kept his shit together like my dad had when the worst struck.
Not once had my father abandoned me, physically or emotionally, after any of the hits he’d taken.
He’d stuck around while Maisey’s dad had escaped to his rig, using money as an excuse for leaving her and Chelsea to shoulder the real loss on their own.
Maisey tried to pull away, but when I didn’t let go, she gave in, resting her forehead on my chest. My hands went to her shoulders, kneading at the stiffness I felt there. She didn’t deserve more heavy burdens landing on her. She’d already had enough for a lifetime.
When she lifted her face, the look of devastation I saw made me want to strangle someone.
“He’s lost his wife, his job, and his pride, Beckett. If he loses his house too…” her voice cracked. “I can’t let that happen. No matter his failings, no matter our past, I love him too much to let him lose the last bit of himself…of Mom…he has left.”
The tightness in my chest grew at her tortured words, wishing I could ease them. I was as helpless today as I was the day her mom had died.
“I can clean out Chelsea’s room,” she continued, “and move in there. After today, she isn’t going to come back.”
My hands, kneading her shoulders, stilled. “Wait. Chelsea was at the house today?”
She scoffed in disgust. “Yep. Turns out the red sports car we saw last night belongs to her latest actor boyfriend. She supposedly stopped on their way to a movie they’re filming in the mountains.
The visit wasn’t pretty and ended just like it had the last time she’d come home, with Dad asking her to leave and her storming out. ”
Something dark and unsettled washed over me. A fleeting thought I couldn’t quite grasp.
“She left before you did?”
“Yeah. Before I could tell her about Dad’s stroke or the trouble he’s in with the house. Not that Chelsea would help him even if she had the money.”
“You said you’d need to clean out her room if you moved in, but when I cleared the house today—” My mouth went dry at just the memory of that terrifying moment when I’d thought Maisey might be there. “Her room was completely empty. Nothing there but the furniture.”
Maisey’s mouth dropped open, and she forced herself out of my arms.
“Empty, empty? Like, no old clothes? No movie posters on the wall?”
“Not even an empty mascara tube.”
I went to draw her back, and she swatted at my hands. I shoved them into my pockets to keep from reaching for her as she returned to her restless pacing.
“Why would Chelsea take everything now?” Maisey’s brows furrowed together. “Anything she thought was of value, she would have taken with her a long time ago.”
Unless she was going to set the place ablaze and wanted a few more mementos of her childhood. Wait. Did I really think Chelsea would set fire to their house? Or was the idea just a leftover of my wounded past, knowing my mother had done just that?
Subconsciously, Maisey twirled one long strand around her finger.
Every fiber in me hated that these new traumas were breaking open old wounds she’d done all the hard work to put behind her. Maisey deserved a future that left behind those pained moments. That gave her the forever after and the permanence she craved.
I certainly hadn’t helped her along that path with my lie today.
But hell, it might actually end up helping us both.
I wouldn’t ever be able to give someone forever—not after what I’d lived through and not after what I’d done to Del—but I could help Maisey temporarily, and she could help me.
What did they call it in romance books? A fake-engagement trope.
It never worked in the books, but it could work for us.
I could keep my new and uncomfortable obsession with the way her hips swayed to myself. I could keep my dick in my pants. I wasn’t some fictional character.
“You can’t move into that house right now,” I told her truthfully.
“The inspector will have to clear it, and the water restoration people need to dry things out. I boarded up the back door before I left today, but I don’t think the house will be livable for months.
You and your dad can move in with me while the repairs are made. ”
Her feet froze so fast that she stumbled over them. “Wh-what?”
“Look. If you insist on helping your dad, you’ll need a place to live free of charge. I have two extra bedrooms that aren’t being used. I’ve painted them and refinished the floors, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.”
She was shaking her head before I’d even finished.
“No. Absolutely not. We’re not taking advantage of you like that.”
Everything in me zeroed in on her response. “How is one friend helping another taking advantage?”
“Beckett, you could rent those rooms out and offset your own expenses.”
“Please. You know I don’t have a mortgage. Dad put me on the title, saying it was going to be mine when he kicked the bucket anyway. I’ve paid for the remodel as I had the money and time to do it, so I don’t have any real debt.”
She was still shaking her head, her entire body moving with the ferocity of it.
“Look. The truth is”—I swallowed hard—“if you moved in, you’d be doing me a favor.”
She snorted in disbelief. “How do you figure that?”
I ran a hand through my hair, scratched the back of my neck, and then shoved my hands back into my pockets.
“Well…things happened today at the station. Things I reacted to in ways I probably shouldn’t have and had me saying things I had no right to say.
But after some thought, it still makes a hell of a lot of sense. ”
Her brows furrowed.
I rocked on my heels. “Seems the chief isn’t going to consider me as his replacement because he thinks I’m too single.”
The confusion on her face grew more pronounced. “What in the world does that mean?”
“Means Nattingly, and the entire city council, wants a married man for the job.” Suspicion flitted over her, but I plowed forward.
“And then Delilah showed up, offering herself up as some sort of sacrifice, suggesting we should get married, as if it would help both our careers. And I sort of panicked. Sort of let my tongue wag before my brain caught up with it.”
“Oh, Beckett…what did you do?” she breathed out, as if already starting to realize, as if knowing me for the majority of my life had given her the inside track to the way my brain worked, which it had.
I finally recovered my balls from where they’d been hiding and told her the truth. “I said I couldn’t marry her because you and I were already engaged.”
Her eyebrows hit her hairline. Panic flitted over her face, followed by something I thought might be fear, before she shut down again. Every single emotion disappeared, and I was left with the bland Maisey I wanted to banish.
“You’re an idiot.” There was no heat to the words. No passion or frustration or anger. And that sort of pissed me off because she should be angry with me.
“The last thing I am is an idiot,” I said with a shrug. The only trouble I ever got into at school came from being bored, waiting for my classmates to catch up.
Maisey looked down and away, and I knew she regretted using the word idiot—a word she despised because of the way people had used it against her. But I proved just what a bastard I could be by using her regret to push my cause.
“Look. This is a two-way street here. I need a fake fiancée, and you need a place to live. You can save your rent money, put it all toward your dad’s mortgage, and no one needs to know you aren’t sleeping in my bed.
” I paused as that image slammed into me—her spread out across my navy sheets, dark hair spread over my pillows, naked skin glowing.
I pushed it aside and kept going. “Plus, I can sweeten the deal by throwing in my manual labor. We can keep the repair costs down at your dad’s by doing a lot of the work ourselves, just like I did with my house. ”
She pressed a hand into her stomach, but she didn’t reject the idea again. Instead, I could tell she was thinking about it, weighing the pros and cons in that careful way Maisey was so good at doing.
“It’s not like this is forever, Maise. We just keep up the engagement until I get the chief’s job, and you get your dad back on his feet. It’s a win-win.”
“And what if Nattingly and the city council expect us to actually say I do before they give you the job?”
My hands turned sweaty, and my lungs filled with ash. I fought past it, shaking my head to give myself time. Once the worst had subsided, I said, “They’ll need someone in the job far sooner than we could plan a wedding.”
She rubbed her forehead. “This is a bad idea, Beckett.”
She hadn’t said no. If she’d been going to, she would have already. This was like when we’d been kids and she’d debated whether she should sneak out of the house to join me in the treehouse at night. She just needed a little nudge.
I closed the distance between us, tugged on a long strand of hair, and indulged myself in wrapping it around my fingers.
She watched me slowly twist it, and I was rewarded with her breath turning choppy.
This new chemistry wasn’t one-sided. I relished knowing she was fighting the attraction too, even if I’d never let us act on it.
“Come on, my Maisey-girl, what’s the worst that could happen?”
The answer popped into my head before she could respond. Sex. Sex and passion and things that might permanently break through the layer of scars that kept my heart from fully feeling anything, that might ruin the only real friendship I had.
No. I wouldn’t risk her for sex.
You’ll risk her for your job, though, a little voice whispered.
I shoved it aside. This wouldn’t risk us. Wouldn’t risk what we had.
If anything, this might bring us even closer. We could be there for each other as we’d once been when we’d lived next door as two broken kids.
This actually might be the best thing that had happened to either of us in a long time.