Chapter Eighteen
RHYS
SHE’S GONE.
I’m not surprised. When I got up and left for work this morning, there was no walking around the kitchen in her skimpy pajamas to tease me as she sipped her coffee. She stayed locked in her room. I hung around, hoping she would come out - she never did.
But I could feel her in the house. I knew she was close and safe. She may have been avoiding me, but she was there.
Now, this house feels emptier than it ever has. My feelings have gone beyond wanting to keep her safe. Her absence is the biggest fucking disturbance, and it’s spreading into every corner of my life.
I may have physically been at work all day, but my mind sure as fuck wasn’t. She’s a distraction whether she’s with me or not. All I can fucking think about is her.
Her calling me just another threat has played on repeat in my mind all goddamn day. She’s right, I crossed a line and then tried to backpedal. I played with her emotions and her body and then tried to push her away. For all intents and purposes, to her, I am a threat.
No woman has ever made that accusation before. Emotionally unavailable - fuck yeah, more than once. A workaholic - in almost every damn breakup. I was called absent and detached once.
Never a fucking threat. What pisses me off to no end is that I can’t deny it. Guilty as charged.
It’s fucking killing me.
Swan called mid-morning and told me her brother Mason was there to get her and her things, and my heart dropped to my stomach. He asked me if I wanted him to say anything to stop her. But I knew he couldn’t stop her any more than I could. She’s not a prisoner.
If I could make her my prisoner, I would.
I put a unit at the end of her driveway to monitor the ranch with instructions to call me directly if anything seems out of place.
Setting my keys on the shelf by the door, I look around my house at the traces of her for the past week and a half. In such a short amount of time, I’ve become attached enough to her that any shadow of her presence is a balm to the pain of her absence.
Scanning the room, the most glaring thing is that her paint supplies and easels are gone, but my eyes land on the painting she made me. It’s sitting on its edge on one of the dining chairs, between the table and the chair back.
Picking it up, I hold it out in front of me against the area that was her inspiration. Damn, she’s good.
Fuck me. What the fuck was I thinking?
She may never speak to me again. The thought makes my heart feel too big for my chest, and I rub the heel of my palm over my sternum like I can rub the ache away.
Instead of knocking on her bedroom door last night to tell her I don’t want her to leave, instead of trying to fix what I broke, I went to bed and lay there staring at the ceiling until the early hours this morning.
There’s only one person I can think of to help me with this. I’ll go visit him tomorrow. Surely he won’t be teaching any classes on a Saturday.
My dad lives on the University of Tulsa campus in one of the few faculty housing units. He’s been teaching English Literature and Linguistics my entire life, during half of which he made me read as many classics as he could shove in front of me. Until I enlisted and left home.
I’ve never told him this, but I kept the list of books he wanted me to read when I was a teenager, and I sometimes pick a book from the list and read it.
After Mom died, he couldn’t bear to stay in the house she loved so much, so he asked me to take the house, and he moved into faculty housing. He said she would love that I’m living in the house.
Driving to the back of one of the student housing units, I park in the street in front of a quaint little house set back from the road.
As I walk up the sidewalk, I pass the many birdhouses and hummingbird feeders placed around the yard. Dad has always loved bird watching.
The big wooden front door opens before I get to the top of the porch steps, and Dad steps into the frame.
“Rhys, my boy!” Even though he has lived in the United States for thirty years, his accent sounds like he came from England yesterday. He holds his arms out and waits for me to walk across the porch. I got my height from him, he’s just an inch shy of my six foot three.
Dad is English through and through. When he met my mom, he was working at Cambridge University in the English Literature program.
He was in his forties when they met and has always told me that when he heard my mom play in the symphony he took one of his many dates to, he never looked at another woman after.
My mom always used to laugh and say that was the night the sound of a collective of women crying themselves to sleep in their pillows could be heard across Cambridge. Some of the comments she would make about my dad’s sexual prowess had me running from the room blushing on many occasions.
She was from Spain and was loud, gregarious, and loved to laugh. She rarely held back her opinions and never apologized for having one. They couldn’t be any more different, but they fit together like two halves of a whole.
Even though his hair is gray, he still has plenty of it.
I’ve heard people say how young he looks my entire life, if I didn’t know he was in his seventies, I would think he was in his fifties.
I always used to tease him because he looks like an English professor, from his immaculately cut gray beard on his narrow features, to his patch-sleeve cardigans.
“Hey, Dad.” He slaps my back in a tight hug before stepping back and swinging his arm for me to come in.
The entryway table has a vase of fresh orchids, my mom’s favorite flower, next to a picture of the woman herself.
It’s one of my dad’s favorites, it was taken during one of her solo concerts and she is sitting behind her cello on stage, the stage lights shining down on her, fingers on the strings, and eyes closed as she pushes her bow across the instrument.
She could easily get lost in her cello and play an entire piece without looking at any music.
“To what do I owe this very welcome surprise?” His deep English accent never fails to take me back to the days of listening to him reading classic literature to me as a child.
“Just my quarterly check-in on my old man.” I playfully quip and follow him into his little sitting room with a window next to more bird feeders.
He grimaces as he moves a pillow out of the chair across from the one he usually sits in. “I’ll never get used to hearing my only child speaking in American colloquialisms and slang.” He chuckles and waves toward the seat he just moved the pillow from. “Gin and tonic?”
“You know I don’t drink, Dad. I’ll take water.”
As he walks out of the room, he chuckles again and shakes his head. “Another thing my son didn’t get from me.”
My dad never turns down a drink.
I watch the birds fly from feeder to feeder as I listen to ice being put into glasses in the kitchen. When he sets a glass of ice water on the table across from me, he says, “So, why don’t you try again, and tell me the real reason for your visit.”
Ignoring the water, I lean forward to set my elbows on my knees and scrub my hands over my face. “I think I fucked up, Dad, and I don’t know what to do.”
The ice cubes tinkle in his glass as he takes a drink and then smiles at me. “I suspect this has something to do with a woman.”
“She’s not just a woman, Dad,” I pause and think about how I felt when she was just existing in the same house with me, “she’s sassy, beautiful, smart, artistic, with a gorgeous fucking body.” Scratching my fingers through my hair, I sigh. “And it’s driving me fucking crazy that she walked away.”
Crossing one leg over the other, he holds his hands out, palms up. “So? Go get her. What’s the problem?”
“She’s also a witness in a case I’ve been working.” I slouch back in my chair and rest my hands on the chair armrests. “She’s off-limits if I don’t want to fuck up everything I’ve built in the past two years.”
For the next ten minutes, I tell him about the last two weeks since Kinley Harlow stormed into my life.
His light blue eyes sparkle. “Ah. The woman-work moral dilemma.” Linking his fingers in front of him, he smiles. “A very American issue.”
Having spent the first forty-something years of his life in England, Dad’s very relaxed view of the world often clashes with my world carefully constructed by rules and boundaries.
“You’re not helping.” I let my head fall back on the chair and stare at the ceiling.
His sigh makes me lift my head to look at him. “I sometimes forget how much like your mother you are. You have her eyes. She was a bloody beautiful woman, she had heart, brains, and looks. She was the epitome of perfection.” His eyes look past me to a place I’ll never go, somewhere in his memory.
I don’t interrupt his walk down memory lane. Her death was hard on him, and for a year or more, I watched him sink deeper and deeper into depression.
His eyes come back to me, and the sparkle returns. “Did I ever tell you I was on track for the appointment of Chair of the Faculty when I met your mother?”
With a tired grin, I shake my head.
He winks at me. “At the time, I was dating the postgraduate coordinator and the senior secretary of the department,” he looks at me teasingly when he says, “and I also had a student or two warming my bed. I was just waiting to get the Chair appointment to be on top of the bloody world.”
Laughing at him, I shake my head. “Did all these women ever find out about each other?”
His eyebrows pull together, and he tilts his head. “Look who you’re talking to? I was so charming they weren’t even mad at me when I stopped seeing them.”
I roll my eyes. “Showoff.”
“Then suddenly, my life was full of music and laughter and a woman with eyes almost as black as coal. It was the most beautiful of times with the most beautiful woman I could ever imagine.” His gaze comes back to the present.
“Then one day, when I thought nothing could cast a shadow on the happiness I was feeling, she told me her orchestra would be going on tour with her as the solo cellist. It was her dream, and she was about to leave me.”
He leans back and crosses his arms. “I gave it all up for her.”
Sitting up, entranced by a part of the story I’ve never heard before, I link my hands in front of me. “Why haven’t I heard this story before?”
“To bring it up would only make her think I still thought of it, and I never wanted her to think I had any regrets. I wrapped my life around her, taking what I could get at whatever university would take me. Nothing else mattered, and I would have never let her think differently.”
Tilting my head, I cock my eyebrow up. “Dad, I know this is supposed to be relevant to my situation somehow, but I’m not sure how leaving my job would be helpful.”
With a sigh, he says, “No wonder you’re here. I’d hoped some of my innate persuasion with the fairer sex would have passed on to you.” He tips his glass back and finishes his drink off before setting the glass on the table. “I blame it on the military influence.”
“Dad, the last thing I want to think about is your innate persuasiveness with the fairer sex.” I shake my head with a chuckle and take a drink of the ice water in front of me.
“Son, what I’m about to tell you is the best advice you’re ever going to hear, most men never understand it.
A woman must feel safe with a man to be truly happy.
She must know that the man who tells her he loves her holds her dreams, feelings, safety, and happiness closer to his heart than he holds his own.
” He points his finger at me. “If you make her feel that, you’ll have the happiest woman in the world, and you’ll be in bloody heaven. ”
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I squeeze my eyes closed. “Dad, she’s a witness to a crime, if I act on my emotions and we get caught, she loses my protection, our testimony against the criminals I’ve been trying to catch will be inadmissible, and I could lose my position and credibility.”
He leans forward and sets his elbows on his knees with a chuckle.
“Then don’t get caught, my boy.” He says it like it’s the easiest thing in the world and shrugs his shoulder, his eyes sparkling.
Lifting his hand, he holds his finger up and shakes it at me.
“Keep in mind that a strong woman who knows what she wants is not easily won back, especially if you wait too long.”