Chapter 31 – Shay
Chapter Thirty-One
Shay
Iagreed to give Cody this second chance and so far – I don’t regret it.
I don’t have much opportunity to think about his violence these days.
I’m pregnant with his child and we made it past that critical six week mark when I feel like the baby growing inside me is real.
Caleb doesn’t know yet, but every time I play with my son, this intense surge of emotion rises.
This could be my chance to give Caleb a real dad – who loves him in the way Rawley couldn’t. If Cody can let the violence go, then maybe I can too… He’s doing everything to prove his love. Why should I let my fear make me run away from this?
He removes my butt plug after we find out I’m pregnant. We make love every day after that. Cody wants to plan every detail and I feel like I’m watching an alien. The first time around wasn’t like this at all. It’s weird to watch Cody care – weird in a good way, but still weird.
Kylie still helps out with Caleb wherever she can.
This gives me a lot of time during the day to get ready for the baby and “nest” the way Cody wants me too.
He keeps mentioning our need to return to his ranch, which surprises me because I thought we were going to stay here for the duration of my pregnancy.
I like it here. The buds of my plants started popping up. Caleb has a routine now where he sleeps through the night consistently. Kylie and I have a great relationship too. For the first time since I watched Cody hurt that man, my nervous system knows peace.
Cody stays determined to make me question that peace. He comes stumbling in from work on Wednesday night when I’m around ten weeks along. He’s on time for dinner, which is his favorite – ground beef chili and cornbread. He nearly trips twice on his way to the dining table.
“Are you drunk or something?” I ask, carefully ladling extra chili into Cody’s bowl as he takes his shearling lined denim jacket off and sits at the table with a wide-legged stance, putting his head in his hands for a second and muttering under his breath before shaking his head like a crazy person. What is going on with this man?
Kylie backs me up that he’s acting strange. I try to get Cody to tell me the truth, but he beats around the bush for quite some time until I finally drag it out of him.
“We have to leave here,” Cody says, his face growing somber and stern as he lets me in on the big problem causing all his groaning and muttering. “And we have to leave soon.”
“Why?” Kylie asks. He glares at her. So long that I question if they have some type of secret communication going on between them. Cody drops his gaze from his sister and turns to me.
“I don’t want to put you through this, Shay… But we’re going back to the ranch and I gotta warn you…”
“It smells like horse shit all the time,” Kylie says. “It’s not nice like this house and bikers turn up every other day to fuck with you. It sucks.”
“Thank you, Kylie,” Cody says each word through gritted teeth. I don’t know if that’s what Cody wanted to tell me, but he doesn’t contradict Kylie’s warning at all.
“Do we really have to leave?” I ask Cody, searching his face for answers. Fear rises in my chest again. There were people after us, I know that. He had to leave and “handle them”, but that could mean anything.
I know this has to do with the club.
“Yes,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean we’re not safe anymore.”
“I’ll go read Caleb a story,” Kylie says, which pretty much means she’s leaving us alone to talk about something serious.
Which means this is serious. Cody Hollingsworth.
I agreed to marry this man and he has been more than I could have ever dreamed except for this one thing that scares the crap out of me.
Explosive violence.
The type of violence that could hurt me and my son and now – my unborn child.
“Tell me the truth, Cody,” I say to him, lowering my voice. “I gave you another chance and–”
“If I tell you the truth, you’ll get spooked,” he responds harshly. “Eat dinner and then I’ll help pack your things. I’ll get Beau to bring a moving van out here for the rest by the end of next week.”
“Are we in a hurry?”
Cody’s gaze remains stern. He doesn’t think that I can handle the truth. I purse my lips and try to prove to him that I can handle the truth – I’m just a mama bear who will do anything to keep her son out of danger. It doesn’t mean that I’m weak.
“Yes,” he says. “But you still have nothing to worry about.”
“That’s not always true.”
“This time it is.”
His gaze softens. “I know what happened before scared you, Shay. I wish I didn’t have to put you in that situation. But if it makes you feel better… This is less about my club and more about your past.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better, Cody.”
I want him to be honest with me, even if I’m scared. But maybe I did too much to get him past that point. He comes closer to me and I feel the warmth and the love coming from Cody. Could we really be that lucky?
“What would make you feel better, Shay? Did it ever occur to you that maybe we weren’t a huge accident? Oske knows both of us. We know each other now. I want you to feel safe with me and I know I screwed up.”
“It wasn’t–”
“Stop,” he interrupts me. “I killed somebody, Shay. It’s been this big fucked up sore point between the two of us and I can’t feel as sorry about it as you want me to.”
Our eyes meet, mostly because I don’t know why he thinks telling me that he isn’t feeling any remorse could improve this situation. Cody’s face might be handsome, but there are no answers etched into those handsome features.
“I would kill again if it meant keeping you safe,” he says. Then he sighs and those broad shoulders sink. “We have to leave here to stop myself from killing again.”
“What does that mean?”
“If I tell you, I need you to promise this won’t make things worse between us.”
“I want to know the truth, Cody.”
“And I want you to love me back,” he snaps. “But every time you find out who I am, it’s not good enough for you, Shay. I’ve never had to question if I’m a good man or not for keeping my people safe.”
The energy between us shifts. It’s like I just touched an exposed wire that startles me back. He’s not as bad as I was when I hit him, but I can feel my husband’s anger coming off him.
“I never said I couldn’t love you, Cody. I never said that.”
He scowls and glares. “I know what you think of me. That I’m some monster. I know I might have made it worse with the tattoo and all that… But I love you, Shay.”
Cody grabs me and the sudden movement takes me by total surprise. His hands are firm as they grip my cheeks and his eyes burn with darkness.
“Promise you won’t overreact.”
My heart pounds so hard that it feels like it jumps in my throat. He must know that I can’t promise that, but I want to know why we’re leaving and what has him so upset – so upset that he’s talking about how he has to stop himself from killing someone.
“Kylie had to step out and handle business for me a while back. Something came up, which was pretty serious and… She did a good job of handling it, but I had to call for outside help.”
I didn’t know Kylie was involved in Cody’s “business”, especially since I get the sense this is more about the motorcycle club than the ranch life.
I’m worried about the dangerous of getting more deeply involved with the club, so I express those worries right away to Cody, hoping to put a stop to anything before it spirals too far out of control.
“I thought everything was good with that.”
“There was a slight hiccup,” Cody says. “They promised me a particular outcome but… turns out not all the men in my family are bloodthirsty.”
Cody, just spit it out. His hands are still on my cheeks, his body still pressed firmly to mine. I can feel all of Cody’s tension building and then his fingers keep sinking into my cheeks, applying more pressure whenever the weight of what he carries feels too heavy for him.
“What happened, Cody.”
I try to sound open, but not desperate.
“Your ex-husband came back to find you and he came close,” Cody says. “I don’t know how he found you, but I wanted him gone.”
The scene of what happened the day Cody shot that guy plays in a rapid flash behind my eyes.
The automatic lurch in my stomach nearly knocks me off balance.
I don’t know what provokes the anxious image to flood into my mind, but I suddenly feel woozy.
I struggle to keep my gaze locked with Cody’s.
This isn’t what I expected from him, but somehow it’s worse.
Did he order my ex-husband dead? Cody keeps talking, his thumbs and fingers moving along the bottom of my jawline until his thumb touches my lower lip.
“When Grayson said there had been a problem and he was going to take your ex-husband to Canada and let him go become their problem – I trusted that would take care of the situation.”
He didn’t kill him?
Cody’s gaze scans mine. He exhales slowly. “I wanted to be a good man for you, Shay. I wanted to let him go and save a man’s life.”
“What happened?”
“Your ex-husband made a huge mistake – and the only thing I can do to keep both of us out of trouble is to take our family back to the ranch.”
“Okay.”
He sighs. “That’s it?”
“You told me not to overreact.”
Cody drops his hand from my cheek. He keeps his gaze on mine.
I feel so small next to this man, but I also feel like he wanted so badly to protect me and he wanted so badly to be a better person for me.
I can’t even think about how terrifying it is that my ex-husband came to find me.
I had to escape my ex-husband with Caleb because he would kill me if he got his hands on me.
He’s the perfect criminal, really. Even if the immigration officers might have been “on to him”, that’s just a coincidence of our country’s strange political turn.
My ex-husband doesn’t seem criminal. He moves like a chameleon.
He has this odd way of maneuvering where he can seem so innocent.
He has those light green eyes and that caramel skin that makes people see him as a victim.
Who wants to believe that a man who looks like that could be dangerous?
It’s much easier to believe that somebody who looks like me is the problem.
After all, I don’t look perfect. I don’t look anything like what every piece of media available says “good” looks like.
It makes it easy not to pay attention to their opinions, but that doesn’t change how the world treats me in comparison to my ex-husband.
It took me a long time to get out from underneath that. But he’s not done with me. It’s bad enough that I had to work so hard to get free from my ex-husband. It’s bad enough that everything he’s ever done has hurt Caleb. He won’t leave me alone, even if he had a second chance.
I feel cold.
“I told you not to overreact,” Cody says, whispering and running his thumb over my lower lip. “I didn’t expect you not to react at all.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“I should have killed him myself,” Cody says. “I don’t want to lose you, Shay. But if I can never win your heart… I might as well keep you safe just because you’re mine.”
I put my hand against his chest. I don’t even know why.
I just want to feel like Cody’s alive. A real human like me, with a real beating heart.
I’m not alone with this chill. I look up at him and he covers my hand with his as our eyes meet.
He won’t kill my ex-husband without my permission, but how can I ever tell him to do something like that?
“Cody…”
“What?”
He’s doing everything in his power to make me happy. I can see that. He had the chance to kill my ex-husband and he didn’t. He loves me. He really loves me.
“I love you.”
“What the hell?” he whispers, grinning just a little bit.
“I love you.”
“I’m so goddamn confused.”
“Don’t be,” I whisper back. My hand is still pressed to his chest. I tiptoe up and kiss him on the lips. My husband. I love my husband.
I don’t know how I got here, but this is where I think I’m meant to be.