Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
It was as if the last two years spent rebuilding her life and her confidence had never happened.
He’d bulked so much more muscle that his t-shirt struggled to cover his shoulders and chest without tearing at the seams. His hair was a little shaggier, his hazel eyes a little wilder than she remembered, making him seem even less like the calm businessman she had first met and more like the man who had always lurked beneath the surface, the one who had beaten her to within an inch of her life.
“Sam?”
Jal closed her eyes and fought the storm of emotion his voice set off inside her.
She hadn’t been Samantha in two years. No, that girl had died so Jal could live. “What do you want, Andy?” she asked, appalled at the tremor in her voice.
Many times, she had imagined what would happen if they ever saw each other again, though she had hoped that it would never happen. All the words she wanted to say with him standing not five feet away, vanished like vapor.
“I lost everything when I went to prison.”
“Nearly beating me to death and then killing someone with your car will do that.”
Anger flickered through his eyes at her tone, and when Ciaran stepped even closer to her, his upper lip curled back.
Almost as quickly as the looks appeared, they vanished leaving a calm, almost hopeful look on his face that made her blood run cold. “But now I’m a rehabilitated citizen. I’ve been looking for you for weeks. I was hoping that I could lay the first brick in rebuilding my life by getting you back.”
Every cell in her body screamed bullshit. But Ciaran was able to voice the words in her head before she could say them. “Are you bloody delusional?”
Andy rounded on him. “And who the fuck are you?”
“At the moment, I’m the man standing between you and the woman you almost killed.” There was so much ice in Ciaran’s voice that she was shocked Andy didn’t freeze solid and then shatter.
“Why the hell do you care?”
Ciaran took her hand. “Because I love her.”
In Andy’s present state, it was not the smartest thing that Ciaran could have said. Andy moved faster than someone with his amount of bulky muscle should have. “She’s mine!” his voice thundered in the semi-enclosed space. He shouldered Ciaran aside.
Jal shrieked as his head collided with the marble and he started sliding to the ground. She scrambled for him, but Andy’s hand wrapped around her upper arm and hauled her toward him. “She has always been mine!”
She went limp in his grasp, and dropped to the ground.
Her belongings clattered to the pavement, scattering in the struggle.
“Get your fucking hands off me, Andy!” Her voice echoed shrilly under the arch as he hauled her feet almost off the ground.
His other hand wrapped around her waist, digging deep into the skin over her hip, deep enough to bruise.
She pounded on his arms, scraped with her nails, but nothing worked to loosen his grasp.
And then, she was free. She stumbled and fell to all fours. Pain erupted in her hands and knees.
Andy staggered away, his back fetching against the other side of the arch. His tongue prodded his cheek as if checking that all his teeth were still in place.
Ciaran stalked forward, sending another roundhouse punch into the other side of his face.
Despite their differences in size, Andy’s head cranked around, blood flying from a split lip.
Ciaran turned to her. “Go, Jal! Run!”
With a roar, Andy charged at him. For a moment, she couldn’t move, hands pressed tightly to her mouth as the two men grappled, trading body blows. Andy threw Ciaran to the ground, holding him down with his forearm, his other arm cocked back readying for a crushing blow.
Jal scrambled to her feet, but instead of leaving, she took two running steps toward them and kicked Andy in the shoulder. With bare feet, it had about as much impact on Andy as kicking marble. Pain shot up her leg and she hopped back. Still, it made both men look in her direction.
The fury in Andy’s face froze her like a deer in headlights, until he pushed off Ciaran and lunged at her.
Ciaran rolled off the ground and leapt onto Andy’s back. “Run!”
Heart in her throat, Jal ran. She elbowed her way through the crowd that had gathered and dove into traffic to a blare of horns.
A taxi slammed on its brakes as she dashed by, the sound of screeching tires quickly followed by a bang and crunch of metal.
She didn’t waste time looking back toward the accident, but took off up Fifth Avenue, her bare feet slapping on the pavement.
She reached Ciaran’s street and turned the corner without thinking, sprinting to his front door.
She jiggled the knob, unsurprised to find it locked.
A gust of wind blew across her exposed skin, and she shivered, twisting the knob again with renewed desperation, driving her shoulder into the door for good measure.
When it didn’t budge, she slid into a heap on the top step, clutching her bruised shoulder and pressing herself as tightly against the door as she could.
Breathe, Jal. Breathe. She repeated over and over, while tapping the back of her head against the door in an attempt to clear her thoughts so she could figure out her next move without her purse, or her shoes, or her knitted wrap.
Especially her wrap. It didn’t provide much warmth, but anything was better than a dress that left her arms and her back completely bare.
A car rolled slowly down the street in search of a parking spot, locking eyes with the female driver as she spotted Jal and bent low to give her a curious look as she passed.
Feeling much too exposed, Jal climbed to her feet using the door for support, her legs screaming with exhaustion, and descended the stairs to the sidewalk.
She looked up and down the street, looking for a good place to hide out of sight.
She leaned over the railing to her right and spotted a pool of shadows under the stairs.
The gate was icy under her fingertips as she pushed it open and tucked herself into the doorway of the basement apartment and danced from foot to foot, arms wrapped around her body. Chafing her arms in search of any spark of warmth, she settled in to wait.
Shuffling footsteps approached from the street. Jal pressed her back deeper into the shadows, shivering.
“Jal, are you there?”
The sound of his voice would have made her knees give out if they weren’t locked and knocking together. She forced frozen muscles into motion, and put one quivering, aching foot in front of the other, one hand braced against the stone stairway.
Ciaran stood at the foot of the stairs. His sweatpants were dirty and torn at one knee, his lip split. She whispered his name, too cold and relieved to shout, and flew across the sidewalk to him.
He caught her and held her tight. “Are you all right, lass?”
She nodded into his shoulder.
He eased her back and the weight of her wrap settled around her shoulders. Jal burrowed into its warmth, and studied him again, finally noticing that he was holding her clutch, her heels dangling from his hand. She held out her hands and he handed them over.
“Well, maybe I should— “
“Let’s go back inside.”
Her eyes widened. “But I ran away and left you.”
Ciaran’s brow furrowed. “I distinctly remember telling you to run.”
Jal shook her head. “No, you don’t understand,” she pleaded, hands wringing together. “I ran.”
He studied her for a moment, then held out a hand. “Come inside.” When she stared at it but didn’t move, he blinked and said gently, “please, lass. It’s very cold.”
She ducked her head, her hair falling in a curtain to cover her face. The color in her cheeks had nothing to do with the cold, as she took his hand.
“Christ, your fingers are like ice!” he exclaimed and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. He rushed her up the stairs and unlocked the door using a keypad hidden in the trim. There was a faint buzz and the door opened with a gentle bump of his shoulder.
Jal clutched her wrap and purse to her chest as Ciaran led the way up the stairs to where his door still stood half-open.
He pushed it the rest of the way open, gesturing for her to walk inside first. She stopped halfway into the living room, unsure what to do next.
If her hands hadn’t been full, she’d be wringing them.
The door closed with a quiet snick behind her and she turned to see Ciaran standing against it, watching her. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’ll do for now,” he replied, voice tight.
“And Andy?”
“The cops showed up and they took him.” he replied. “There were enough people watching to convince them that I was rescuing you from an attempted kidnapping.”
Jal sighed and put a hand to her heart. “Is there anything I can do for you? Get some ice for your jaw, maybe?” She took a few steps toward his kitchen.
He stopped her with a hand on her wrist. She stopped and looked down, remembering the first time he had taken her wrist, his fingers wrapped just as gently, only enough to make her stop, and how different her reaction had been.
“Some answers will do fine,” he replied.
She nodded, and he led the way to the sofa. Jal dropped her belongings on the floor and perched on the edge, her hands clenched together in her lap. Ciaran slowly lowered himself on the other side with a hand on his ribs and leaned back against the cushions, eyes closed.
“Are you sure you don’t need to go get checked out?”
Ciaran cracked one eye. “Andy called you ‘Samantha’?”
Guess not, she thought, and took a deep breath. Here we go…
“My birth name is Samantha Colleran,” she replied.
After all this time, it felt like she was talking about someone else.
“After Andy… did what he did, I needed a new start. So, I went back to my hometown in Pennsylvania and changed my name so the records would be harder to find if, and when, he got out of prison and went looking for me.”
“How did you choose Jal Morrow?”
Despite the quiver of her lips, they curled up at the corners. “My mom’s name was Angelica and I wanted to honor her, but it was Elena who suggested shortening it to ‘Jal.’” she explained, “Morrow came from my father’s grandmother. And there you have it.”
He sat up with a groan and poked at the split in his lip with the tip of his tongue before dabbing at it with the cuff of his sweatshirt. “Can you tell me about what happened two years ago?”
She looked down at her hands, seeing the ghost of the bitten down nails and scabbed cuticles, the product of never knowing which Andy would walk through the door.
“He had been out celebrating something, I can’t remember now what it was, but he came home drunk and ready to party…
with me.” She clenched her hands together, pressing them to her stomach.
“He walked into the living room to find me waiting, a suitcase packed at my feet.”
“You were leaving him.”
She nodded. “Elena was on her way, but he got home before I got outside. We fought, and I tried to grab my things and run, but he followed and pushed me down the stairs. I woke up in the hospital and was told that Andy left me lying there, got into his car and ended up in an accident. The other driver didn’t make it. ”
He cursed and moved a little closer to her on the sofa.
“I was covered in bruises, a sprained neck, a broken leg, and torn ligaments in my shoulder and considered myself lucky. That is, until the doctor came in and told me that—“
“That you were pregnant.”
Her jaw dropped. “How did you know that?”
He shrugged. “I felt the scar last night and figured that it had to have come from a cesarean.”
She nodded. “The other injuries I could recover from, but that alone almost killed me. I was on bed rest for five months, Ciaran. It would have been so easy for me to lose the baby, and I thought about that so, so many times, but I just couldn’t.
No matter how horrible the father had been to me, it wasn’t the baby’s fault.
The moment they placed her in my arms, I knew that I couldn’t keep her, that I couldn’t give her the life she deserved. So, I put her up for adoption.”
Ciaran watched her curiously, then his eyes darted to her lap and back to her face. Jal looked down. While she had been talking, her arms had come up as if holding an infant. She dropped them to her lap again.
Ciaran scooted a bit closer and took her hand. Jal wrapped both of hers around his and held it like a lifeline.
“What did you name her?”
“Everly.” She swallowed against the knot in her throat. She hadn’t spoken her daughter’s name aloud in over a year. “Everly Anne Colleran.”
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know.” Her heart constricted around the hollow place in her heart that had existed since the nurse had taken Everly from her arms for the last time. “It’s been fifteen months. I don’t even know where to start.”
“Have you ever thought of trying to get her back?”
“Every day,” she murmured, unable to meet his eyes. “But I’ve seen too many stories on the news about birth mothers tearing their children away from the only homes and parents they knew to be with a total stranger. I couldn’t do that to her. She’s better off wherever she is.”
“But are you?”
Jal looked up into Ciaran’s face. “I’m really sorry, Ciaran.” A lone tear slid down one cheek.
He brushed it away, his hand lingering to cup her cheek. “I knew that whatever it was that made you fear my touch had to have been bad.” He said, and gently tucked her hair behind her ear. “But I told you whatever your truth was— “
“That it was safe with you.”
He smiled. “Aye, and I meant it. Whether your name is Samantha, or Jal, or even Angelica.”
She scrunched up her nose.
“Okay, then,” he replied with a chuckle. “It doesn’t much matter to me. I love you. And want to be with you, to help you, in any way I can. If you will let me.”
She ducked her head then, unable to bear the emotions swelling up in her.
He put a finger under her chin and brought her gaze back up, a soft smile on his lips. “All I ask is that from now on, if you ever feel the need to run again, that you run to me. Here, in my arms, I swear you will always be safe.”
She went into his arms and went thoroughly to pieces.
He wrapped his arms around her then and held her while she cried, releasing all of the pent up grief, and fear, and pain.
He brushed her hair away from his face and rested his chin on the top of her head.
She snuggled into him as close as she dared, and breathed in his scent, tinged now with sweat and blood, but calming, nonetheless.
“I promise.”