33. Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Three
Ava
Since the night Stephen and his sister got into a fight and I bawled in Stephen’s arms, I’ve been sneaking over to his apartment after Landon falls asleep.
Landon’s solid sleeping habits are either a credit to how safe he feels in this house, how tired the accident has made him, or how much his return to school has impacted him. There have been no late-night visits.
With Landon’s and Stephen’s DNA samples secured and Landon out like a light in his bedroom, I make my way to Stephen’s apartment.
He’s reverted to treating me like glass—forehead or temple kisses, enveloped in a Stephen-shaped cocoon all night, but any attempts to prod us into more are met with his firm resistance.
If he wasn’t rock hard while he was turning me down, I’d be wondering if all my renewed feelings are one-sided.
Tonight, though, I’m going to his apartment with a new mission. Not to tease or taunt or for physical closeness. I’m well enough to understand, and it’s time I got some answers.
The doors between the apartments are thrown wide, and a little thrill shoots down my spine, like it always does when I register how welcome I am.
We’re on the cusp of sharing everything, and that realization makes me feel light, invincible even.
When we were together last time, we kept our relationship so far under the radar that most people outside our tightest circles didn’t even know anything was happening.
This time? I don’t want to hide. I don’t want to hide anything.
When I enter his apartment, Stephen is drinking a glass of water, leaning against the counter of what makes up his kitchen. His apartment isn’t small, exactly, but compared to his parents’, it feels more like a hotel suite than a home. Open and impersonal. No sense that he lives here.
“What’s your sister’s apartment like?” I ask as I take his glass of water, sip it, and hand it back.
“The layout is similar. Except she opted for a real one-bedroom instead of this studio style when we were renovating.”
“This bungalow was once all one house, right?”
“Yeah.” Stephen drains his glass and sets it on the counter. “I bought it.”
“Before you moved back?”
He grimaces and stretches his hands out along the counter, leaning back. Stalling, I think.
“Not before you left?” My heart kicks at what that might imply.
“No,” he says, and a hint of a smile tips his lips, as though he can read my thoughts or the expression on my face. “A few months before my accident.”
“Were these renovations always the plan for the house? Three apartments?”
“Yes and no,” he says. He shoves off the counter and takes my hand, leading me toward his bed. He lies down in the middle and then beckons me to come down too.
Without hesitation, I crawl onto the bed and curl around him, resting my head on his shoulder. “What does yes and no mean?” I prod.
“The plan was for Vanessa to move here with my parents and in separate apartments, similar to what it is now. Originally, we were doing the accessibility piece for my mom. I’d planned to come home for a bit to do most of the renovations myself to save money.
Then the accident happened, and Owen paid a company to renovate for me. ”
“You didn’t want a real bedroom?” I ask.
“Well,” he says, sucking in a deep breath. “Right afterwards, nobody was sure how mobile I’d be. I was… I was pretty broken. Fewer doors meant fewer potential obstacles.”
I cuddle closer, and I squeeze him. Relief that he’s here, that he’s all right, mixes with gratitude that I get to be like this with him again. Whatever occurred didn’t rob us of this second chance. “Will you tell me what happened?”
“That was the deal, wasn’t it?” He weaves his fingers into my hair, but it takes a while before he says anything more.
“I can’t tell you who was involved. A lot of what I did for Owen internationally was top secret, and I don’t know, maybe some of our missions weren’t that legal.
I didn’t ask a lot of questions. Now, my future is tied in a knot with Owen’s.
He looks after me and mine, and I protect his reputation and the company’s. ”
So much of me wants to be someone Stephen claims as his too.
To be under the umbrella of his protection.
When I was younger, I fought against Stephen’s claim of “you’re mine” whenever we’d come back together after a separation.
But he was right. I was his. I’m still his.
The idea that I could have ever been anyone else’s feels silly now, a childish notion.
Like I didn’t really understand myself or us.
He is as essential to me as breathing. If he’d died in the accident, I’d never have recovered.
Even with time and distance between us, his death would have collapsed my lungs, left me gasping for life.
No surgery or repair in the world would have been able to fix his loss.
“So you weren’t just a bodyguard?” I whisper, willing myself not to cry. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive and he’s mine again.
“Sometimes I was. Depended on what was needed. What I was willing to do. Which was everything when I first left. Nothing was too dangerous. In a lot of ways, I was lucky it took as long as it did for something bad to happen.”
“I need you to tell me. Just tell me.” Part of me doesn’t want to know, but I hate that anyone could ever know Stephen better than me, understand him more than me, map his history with greater accuracy than me.
He releases a deep sigh and plays with my hair for another couple of minutes before he says, “Short version or long version?”
“Long,” I say.
“You always did like all the details.”
“I liked being the one you told everything to. That I got to know you and your life in ways no one else could.” And I want that again, desperately. To me, tonight is the start. “I gave you all my ugly moments.”
“Fair enough,” he says. “I was in Russia. We had a very wealthy client who made some bad financial deals, which put his family in a sticky situation.” He swallows.
“Standard bodyguard stuff. Or so Owen told us in the briefing before we went in. I’d been going from one high-risk situation to another, and this assignment was supposed to be contained, lower risk. Easy.”
When he pauses, I want to pepper him with questions, but if telling me feels anything like when I have to talk about the car accident, I understand his struggle. Retelling is reliving, which may be remembrance in its mildest form, but the feelings those memories stir up aren’t nothing.
“Right away, the situation wasn’t exactly as described, but that was…
sometimes par for the course. People didn’t want to be honest about their dirty dealings.
I was used to those half truths. The vibe on the compound was off too.
Tense and paranoid. They wanted round-the-clock security from us, but they weren’t willing to pay the number of staff we’d need to make it airtight.
Owen thought that was fine because the assignment scored as minimal risk on almost every metric.
And after we’d been there a few weeks, I mostly agreed with Owen.
But I should have trusted my initial gut feeling and had Owen pull us out.
Client safety, our safety is supposed to be number one and two.
With the way we were forced to run shifts and coverage, I couldn’t guarantee either of them. ”
“Sounds like Owen should have done his job better.”
“He’s got regrets. We all do.” He runs his big hand along my spine in a soothing motion.
“The morning it all went sideways, there’d been a last-minute schedule change for the family, which meant we were scrambling.
Out of routine. The car we needed wasn’t where it was supposed to be.
One of the other guys went to get it near the garage.
Instead of sweeping the car for bugs or explosives, he just got in.
Completely against protocol. Whatever extra sense I have switched to high alert, and I started running toward the car to remind him.
That’s not the way we do things. And then the car exploded.
” He makes a blow-up gesture with his hands.
“My memory is pretty fragmented after that.”
“You don’t remember any of it?” Maybe that’s a blessing. The car accident is like that for me too. Snippets of memory that I’m not even sure are accurate.
“I haven’t talked about it a lot,” Stephen admits, his voice gruff. “Owen forced me into therapy after my physical injuries were sufficiently healed. Said he couldn’t have someone running the Bellerive division who was wounded physically and mentally.”
“These?” I ask, tracing the little scars on his cheek.
“Shrapnel from the car. Lucky I didn’t lose an eye.”
“You just woke up in a Russian hospital?”
He takes a deep breath, and his hand digs deep into my hair again. He kisses the top of my head. “I don’t know if I should tell you this.”
“I want to know.”
“One of the fragments of memory I have is… When I was fighting for consciousness, I thought you were there. I was so sure it was you. Long, dark hair, blue eyes, and I think I wanted it to be you. That if I was going to die, I wanted the last person I saw to be you.”
“Stephen,” I say, choking on tears.
“And I think I kept saying your name, asking this person, who I thought was you, not to leave me.” His voice is rough with emotion.
I almost can’t bear to hear more. To know I’m the reason he left, that he was in that situation because of me, and yet I was still the only person he wanted in that moment.
Feels impossible for both realities to be true.
He should have hated me. He should still hate me.
Clutching him, I scoot forward to bury my face in his neck. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’re the reason I’m here, Ava. Every time I’d almost lose consciousness, I’d fight to come back because I didn’t want to give up the sight of you—or who I thought was you.
More time. I just wanted more time. Later, in the hospital, I asked for you, and the doctor showed me a photo of the paramedic who’d worked on me—dark hair, blue eyes—not you.
But that explosion didn’t just cause this…
tremendous physical shift. The injuries.
The concussion. The long recovery. That was all the outward stuff that people could see.
Inside, I knew I needed to come back, see you, figure shit out. ”
“Oh, god,” I whisper, realizing what he’d have learned about me.
“Then I got back to Bellerive, and Owen told me you were married to one of the richest men on the island. That the two of you had a kid.” He takes a deep, shuddering breath.
“I swear it was like having my life blow up all over again. And it was too hard to know the details, so I avoided them. It wasn’t until Tucker Securities got the contract for your protection that I looked at the dates. ”
“And you thought I lied about Landon?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
That admission slices across me, sharp and painful. He thought I could have hidden his child from him? I don’t know what I would have done if the DNA results had come back with Stephen as the father. “I would never have lied to you about something so important.”
“It’s maybe the one thing I wouldn’t have been able to forgive you for,” he says.
“You avoided me? When you came back? Even though I was the reason you returned?” My throat feels full and tight with emotion.
“You had your fairy-tale ending, even if it broke my fucking heart to hear about it. I sure as hell didn’t need to see it.”
“My marriage has never been hearts and flowers. Never. Not once. We were a business arrangement masquerading as a family. Created by logic, not love.”
“You did choose it, Ava.”
I grow quiet, cuddled up next to him, because he’s right.
There are all kinds of things I can say about how crushed I felt when he left, but that doesn’t change the choices I made.
Maybe that makes me weak and selfish, but that’s who I was.
Maybe that’s who I still am—a woman who doesn’t deserve someone like Stephen Foster.
But if I can help it, I’m not giving him up, giving him back.
“I’m making different choices this time,” I say, “and I don’t want you to treat me like glass anymore.” With my fingers, I tilt his chin to face me.
He gives an almost imperceptible nod, and then he tugs me on top of him. His hands dig into my hair, but when he draws me into a kiss, it’s gentler than I like.
“Stephen,” I plead.
He lets out a little chuckle. “You’re still mending, baby. So we can do this, but we do it my way.”
“I’m okay with a bit of pain for some pleasure.”
“Someday soon, I won’t love you like you’re fragile—I’ll love you like you’re fire, and I’m not afraid to get burned.”
“Maybe we can settle on a first-degree burn tonight?” I ask, kissing him and then drawing back. “What do you say, Officer Foster?”