Chapter 15
Grace rode shotgun while Brett drove Razorback’s SUV, the babies once again strapped into their car seats behind them. She and Brett hadn’t exchanged more than a few words since leaving the HERO Force offices, and she peeked at him out of the corner of her eye.
He wore sunglasses, the golden-brown skin of his forearm gleaming over his muscles as he drove. They’d made it out of the city and were headed to upstate New York in search of the twins’ grandmother.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” he asked.
She frowned. “Not much to say.”
“How did he find you?”
“I have an app on my phone that lets him see where I am. I had him install it so I would know where he was when he was late.”
He hissed. “That’s a little stalker-ish.”
“I know.” At the time, it had seemed like a good idea. John was forever getting called to the nursing home, hospital, or a parishioner’s house. She’d completely forgotten he would be able to track her movements, as well. She sighed. “It’s my fault for not calling him back. He was worried.”
“I’m sure all is well now that he knows you’re safe with me.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course.” She knew he was kidding, just as she knew he wanted the details of her conversation, but she didn’t even know what she thought of it yet. She resisted the urge to squirm in her seat.
“He doesn’t seem like your type.”
“What do you know about my type? You barely know me at all.”
“I’m an excellent judge of character.”
She snorted. “I’ll bet you are. It’s all that practice you’ve had with women in bars, judging who you can get the pants off most quickly.”
“You follow the rules, maybe too much. You believe in being responsible and trustworthy and honest.”
She shrugged. “The same can be said for most people.”
“No, it can’t, though it’s interesting as hell that you think it can. Given all that, I don’t understand why you’re willing to lie to your boyfriend to help me.”
She cocked her head. “What makes you think I’m lying to him?”
“Because he likes me even less than you do, and I can’t imagine he’d be happy with his woman missing the biggest church event of the year so you can hang out with me—no matter how cute those kids are.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “The church picnic.”
He nodded. “See? I pay attention. I saw the banner over Main Street.”
She looked away. In all the excitement of the last few days, she’d completely forgotten about the picnic.
As soon as he realized she wasn’t hurt and hadn’t been taken against her will or abducted by aliens, John must have been livid about her missing the picnic, and that was before she broke up with him.
She was a dirty sock slung over the bottom rung of the relationship ladder, a joy-sucking leech on the structure of male-female dynamics. “I’m not his woman anymore.”
“Since when?”
She shouldn’t be telling him this, shouldn’t be letting him move even closer. But she needed to talk about it, needed to admit what she’d done. “Since about an hour ago.”
“Want me to set him straight? You’re just helping me out.”
“He didn’t dump me, Brett.”
He turned his head to look at her. “You dumped him?”
She shrugged. “I wouldn’t use those words, but yes.”
“Weren’t you going to marry this guy?”
“It was a mistake. He’s a great guy, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t think he’s a great guy for me.”
“And you realized this now, between babysitting, being held at gunpoint, and getting very little sleep.”
“I got plenty of sleep, thank you very much.”
“You can’t make huge, life-altering decisions in the state you’re in.”
He was questioning the choice that had been difficult enough for her to make without his input, just as John had done, and she immediately went on the defensive. “What do you care? It’s my life, and I’m nobody to you. Like you said yourself, I’m just helping you out.”
“That’s right. That’s all it is, just you and me, getting these boys to their new home. Nothing else.”
“What are you implying?” She knew the answer, but she wanted him to say it so she could shove the words back down his throat. He was lighting her insecurities on fire, and in that moment, she hated him for it.
“It means I don’t want you doing something crazy just because we have some chemistry. You can’t piss your future away over a little physical attraction. We didn’t even kiss, for God’s sake.”
If her cheeks were flushed before, now they were crimson. “Screw you, Champion. You don’t have anything to do with my decision.”
“Just calm down and listen to me. You didn’t do anything wrong. All of this can be fixed. I’ll tell the preacher it was all my fault, which it was, anyway. He’ll understand. He’s a good guy, right?” He pulled abruptly into the right lane and put his turn signal on.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m taking you home.”
They were passing the area in which they lived en route to Rochester, the exit that led toward their apartment coming up in less than a mile. “He loves you. He’d do anything for you. He’ll understand.”
“You don’t get to decide how I handle this.”
“I’m keeping you from making the biggest mistake of your life. Don’t worry about the twins. I’ll turn around and get Razorback to come with me. If he can diagnose a disease from a purple diaper, he can damn well change one, too.”
“Stop it. I don’t want to go home, I don’t want to talk to John, I don’t want to be engaged to him, and I absolutely will not beg him to take me back!”
Brett took the exit. “This is all my fault. I never should have brought you with me.” He flew through the EZ-Pass lane.
“Damn it, you’re not listening. Pull over.”
“No.”
“I said pull over. I’m not your hostage and you don’t get to order me to go home because you disagree with me. Now pull the fuck over, Champion!”
He swerved into the parking lot of a diner, pulling diagonally across two spaces and throwing the transmission into park. “Tell me it isn’t because of me.”
The lie sat on the tip of her tongue, but he was right when he’d judged her so quickly, saying she was honest. That hadn’t always been the case.
Her credibility had been hard-won over her first few years in the Bryant family, and it wasn’t something she was willing to give up now, even if it meant looking like a fool.
“It isn’t just because of you,” she hedged.
“Goddamn i—”
She touched his arm. “Hear me out.” Tears threatened, but she held them in check, the things she was about to share touching parts of her memory that clutched tightly to pain, even after all these years.
“I was adopted.” She waited for him to interrupt, but he seemed to understand this was important.
“I spent some time in foster care before I came to live with the Bryants. About a year and a half.”
“How old were you?”
“Eight. Almost ten when I got out.” She made sure her voice was steady before she spoke again. “The Bryants were good people, the kind who knew right from wrong, but I wasn’t like them. At least, not when I first got there. I was a liar and a thief. I had no credibility whatsoever.”
She’d never told anyone this, not the raw side of the equation, not the hole that had been punched in the wall of her childhood. “I wanted them to keep me, but I knew I had to be good. Better than I’d ever been in my life.”
“You had to be perfect.”
She nodded, a tear falling. “And I never stopped.” She took a ragged breath, mentally cursing her emotional display. “I’m twenty-seven years old, and I was going to marry a man I didn’t love just to make them happy.” She could see it now, see it clearly. All her discomfiture, all her misgivings.
“You don’t love him?”
She shrugged with her whole arms. “He was nice.” She pointed to a man in a polo shirt and khaki shorts getting out of a minivan. “That guy seems nice, too. Does that mean I should marry him? Is that what a rational person would do?” A stream of children filed out of the van, along with a woman.
“I think he’s already taken.”
She smacked his arm. “You know what I mean.”
He reached across and opened the glove box, withdrawing a small packet of tissues and handing them to her. “Razorback’s a wuss. Ten bucks says there’s a nail file in there, too.”
She pulled a tissue out of the package. “Thank you.”
He crossed his arms, exhaling on a hum. “So.”
“So.”
“So this isn’t really about me.”
“Nope.”
“Not even a little?”
She sighed on a smile. “Fine, if it will soothe your ego, it was a little bit about you.”
“How, exactly?”
“Chemistry.” She looked at her hands. “I never felt that before.”
“Never?”
She looked out her window. “You’re not making this any easier.”
“I mean, you never felt it for John, or you never felt it ever, like in your whole life, ever?”
Her eyes followed a big truck past the parking lot. “Can we go, please? Can we just get back on the road now?”
He seemed to be moving in slow motion as he put the car back in drive and made his way out of the parking lot. “Ever,” he said quietly.
She smirked despite herself. “I hate you so much right now.”
They drove through the tollbooth and sped up the ramp. “Not ever? I just can’t wrap my head around it.”
She growled, exasperated.
“But you’ve had sex, right?”
Her mouth dropped open. “Of course, you idiot!” She huffed.
The gall of this man! “Now this conversation is over. I’m going to read Joni’s research articles.
See if I can find out exactly what she was working on.
” Turning away, she curled her legs beneath her on the seat and stared unseeing into the distance, her reflection coming into focus in the glass.
Her heart was racing, her stomach in knots.
Turned out, she could still lie—if the stakes were high enough.