CHAPTER THREE SECOND TRY
CHAPTER
THREE
Second Try
It was late in the evening when Lee heard a car pull up outside. Despite everything he’d said to Cora about not being a target, he grabbed his baseball bat before peeking out of the window.
Cora climbed out of her blue Plymouth, and he tucked his bat behind the door. He came out to meet her, surprised but pleased until he saw her face.
‘Who did this?’ He brushed her cheek gently with his thumb.
‘I’m all right.’
‘Is this because of the article?’ A cold dread pierced him through that he had led her to danger and hadn’t been there to protect her when it struck.
‘No. It was—’ She stopped herself. ‘It looks worse than it is.’
The side of her face had bloomed into a dark bruise and the swelling in her jaw made her words slur.
Lee settled her on his one chair and brought her a whiskey and soda. Her hand trembled as she brought it to her lips, and she drank it in one. He made her another, pulled up a crate beside her to sit on and took her hand. ‘Tell me what happened.’
Cora shrugged. ‘We had a fight.’
Lee’s muscles tightened as he realized what she was saying. ‘Roscoe?’ he sputtered. Not strangers. Not someone who’d read the article. Not the Klan. ‘Roscoe did this?’
The tips of his ears throbbed. He rose and in two fluid strides was at the door, grasping for the baseball bat.
‘No, Lee.’
He barely heard her. He was going to kill Roscoe.
‘I need you to be with me right now.’
Lee hesitated at the door. He had to stay for her, but he had to go for her as well.
‘Please, stay.’
It was like being sliced in two. He couldn’t sit here and leave this unanswered, but he couldn’t leave her. Her words jogged a memory: their last night before he’d enlisted. Please stay, she’d said, and he’d left and ruined everything.
He looked back at her, gripping the bat like he might strangle the sap out of it.
Cora got up and stood in front of him.
He blinked and breathed, and slowly let the bat drop from his fingers. He reached for her and folded her into his arms. She was air and sunlight and everything good, and it was against the laws of nature that this should have happened to her.
She pressed herself against him, tilting her head onto his shoulder. ‘Could I stay here tonight?’
He wanted her to stay with him every night, but the fact that she was asking because of what Roscoe had done hollowed out his joy. This was not the way he was supposed to win her back, with Cora paying the price.
‘Of course,’ he said, and brushed a kiss, whisper soft, over her swollen cheek. He could feel the heat radiating off it. ‘You don’t ever need to go back there again.’
She smiled a half-smile and winced.
‘How about you lie down,’ he said, ‘and I’ll bring you some ice?’
He settled her on his bed and went to the kitchen where he wrapped ice in a towel. He eased himself beside her and held the towel gently against her bruised and swollen face. ‘So, I guess he knows about us,’ he said.
‘He does,’ she said, making a wry face. ‘But now I know about him too.’
‘What do you mean?’
She sighed. ‘Roscoe’s been in love with some woman in Great Britain all this time.’
Lee propped himself up on his elbow and squinted down at her. ‘When you say “all this time” …’
‘Ever since he first posted to Wales. She wrote him a letter asking him to come back. It sounds like he promised he would.’
‘When he’d already married you.’ Lee’s nostrils flared.
She looked at him with soft eyes. ‘I never should have married him.’
‘I never should have rushed off like I did.’
‘We’re a mess,’ she said.
‘Maybe we made mistakes, but we don’t have to keep on making them.’ He ran a gentle finger along her unbruised cheek. ‘Don’t stay with him.’
She wrapped her fingers around his forearm.
‘Give me another chance.’ His voice was hoarse with feeling.
She drew him to her, tipping her mouth a little to the side to kiss him.
He knew it must hurt, but when he tried to pull back, she wouldn’t let go.
Instead, she tugged him closer, wrapping one leg around him and sliding her hands under his shirt, a silent command to make up for their lost years and fumbled chances.
He groaned, unashamed of his transparent need for her that threatened to consume him.
‘Tell me if I hurt you,’ he said, hovering over her. ‘I can stop if it’s too much.’ He said it and he meant it, but the last thing he wanted to do was stop.
‘Shut up, Lee,’ Cora said, pulling him down, chest to chest. Beside them, the towel of ice crashed to the floor.