Chapter 26 #2
“Several times a week. It got so bad she couldn’t work and needed medication to curb her anxiety. Sometimes there wasn’t enough money to pay for everything so I…I stole again. I know I only did it to survive but…”
“You don’t sound like you believe it.” He jerked the SUV into an emergency pull-off on the highway and flipped on the hazards.
The hammering of her heart drowned out the whoosh of the traffic as he threw the car in park.
Gripping the wheel, knuckles white against the black leather, his jaw clamped tight enough to break.
He turned to her slow and controlled, but she swayed back from the force of the icy anger in his dark, dangerous gaze.
“Listen to me, Tessa, and listen damn fucking good. Don’t ever apologize again for being the victim of child abuse.”
“Abuse.” She whispered the word she’d spent years refusing to believe applied to her. Tears pooled in her eyes, not from guilt, but from furious relief as she allowed the blame to finally shift.
He reached over and touched her cheek. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
So many answers swirled through her head in the space of a heartbeat. She landed on the truth, laughing through her tears. “Because I like when you call me a pretty little thief.”
“Pretty little thief doesn’t begin to sum up what you are, Tessa.”
She closed her eyes and breathed in the warm affection and the unmistakable desire in his voice. “I went to your suite this morning to thank you for salvaging Fluffy and to tell you everything about my past, but you were in the shower, looking like a god and—”
He tapped his finger to her lips with a cocky smirk. “We’ll circle back to you thinking I’m a god, but first finish telling me everything you’ve been holding back.”
“Okay.” She pulled in a breath for courage. “The night after my high school graduation, I came home from my lifeguard shift and found two cops talking to Frank at the door of our trailer. I ran like I’d been taught, but I didn’t get far.”
“Fucking bastards.”
Pain flared, but not as bright as usual.
“I didn’t deserve the brutality, but I did deserve to be held accountable for not paying for gas so I could take my mom to a specialist a couple of hours away.
But you know what the worst part was? It wasn’t the fear when I saw the cops or the pain I felt when they hurt me.
Or spending the night in a jail cell with two hookers who were really sweet. ”
Hudson shifted his hand to her knee and sat back. “This worst part is going to piss me off, isn’t it?”
She smiled at his protective vehemence. “When I was ten, fear of getting arrested was one of the many reasons I wouldn’t play Frank’s games any longer.
After bailing me out of jail, he took me to breakfast to celebrate.
Like I’d passed some sort of screwed-up milestone and survived, and now I didn’t have reason to be afraid of going to jail any longer.
” She rolled her eyes. “When I refused to go back to being his accomplice, he told me I owed him for paying off the cops to make my arrest go away.”
“Is that why you defend him? Because you feel a sense of misplaced obligation?”
She shrugged. “Not misplaced. I wouldn’t have my job if he hadn’t paid to wipe my record.”
“You wouldn’t have a record if he hadn’t been a shitty father.”
“That’s what I told my mother and somehow convinced her to leave Frank and move to Long Island with Lia and me.” She relayed the story of how getting caught by Lia’s mom led to a lifelong friendship.
“Remind me to send those women a huge bouquet of flowers.”
Tessa stared at him. “Why?”
“Because if it wasn’t for them, you might still be in Florida, and I wouldn’t be sitting next to the most beautiful, courageous woman I’ve ever met.”
His words healed a piece of her heart and gave her the courage to continue. “After we moved to Long Island, I managed to dodge Frank until the night I got a call from an unknown number. I was working a paramedic shift and I didn’t answer, but I listened to the voicemail. It was Frank.”
“I’m assuming you blocked his number or got a new one after you left him? How did he find you?”
“My mother. Therapy and medication had helped her recognize the dysfunction in her marriage, but she had a relapse and called him.” Tessa sighed.
“Frank came to town and went straight to a bar and got the crap beaten out of him by someone he tried to scam. He called me for a ride. When I didn’t answer, he called my mother.
She passed out while driving him back to our place and got into an accident. I was called to the scene.”
“Tessa.” Hudson ripped off his seat belt. Cursing, he held his ribs and wrapped his arm around her.
She couldn’t stop her tears. “We tried to save her but couldn’t. Frank, who didn’t have a scratch on him from the accident, told me it was my fault she died because I didn’t answer the phone.”
“That’s fucking bullshit, and you know it.”
She sniffed. “Now I do, at least some of the time. But back then?”
He leaned back and cupped her face in his hands. “And do you know that you aren’t to blame for being manipulated? Or for the tough choices you had to make to survive?”
She gripped his wrists and held on tight. “I’m starting to.”
“And you’ll keep going until you believe it so hard you never question what anyone thinks about you. As long as I’m around, I’m the only one who calls you a little thief.”
Clicking his seatbelt, he checked the side mirror and slid the SUV into traffic. The smooth roll and his supportive, beautiful words soothed the ragged beating inside her chest. As he grabbed her hand and kissed her knuckles, her broken parts stitched themselves back together.
But soon he would leave.
That new crack his departure would surely bring was already tearing her heart in two.