Текст книги "Everything I Left Unsaid"

Автор книги: Molly O'Keefe

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

DYLAN

“Dylan? Jesus. Earth to Dylan!”

Dylan jerked when Blake punched him in the shoulder.

“What? What the fuck?” Dylan snapped. There was a precision wrench in his hand, and he didn’t know what he was doing with it. The transmission in front of him was in pieces, but he could not for the life of him remember what he was doing. Was he putting it together or taking it apart?

Stop. Just stop. I’ve been bossed around, thrown into cars, driven to some kind of mountaintop fortress to…you. You, Dylan. You ended it and I still wound up here. To you!

Annie’s voice ran in a loop in his head.

She’d been inevitable, all along. From the moment she picked up that phone, every road led them to each other.

And now…now the roads were empty. And the work that had satisfied him, that had pulled him out of the shit of his past, away from the ghosts and the demons that haunted him, was stretched out in front of him and he did not care.

He was going to miss her for the rest of his life. Every minute she was gone, he was going to be eaten up by a kind of loneliness he’d never thought he’d feel again.

Not since Max. His parents. Those long, awful nights behind bars.

The kind of loneliness that came from the absence of one specific person.

But the jagged hole made by Annie’s leaving was sharper somehow, because for so long he’d mastered feeling as little as possible.

And he didn’t know if she was going to come back.

The rest of his life was going to feel this way.

He felt like he had after the accident. The fire. High on painkillers, staring down at his body like it was meat. Like he was somewhere buried inside of it, or floating above but not at all a part of it.

Not a part of anything.

“Get out of here,” Blake said. “You’re a fucking mess.”

He was. He was a fucking mess. He threw the wrench down and left the warehouse. His guys…Blake, they could do it all at this point. No one needed him.

I need you. Please, I need you.

He’d go down off this mountain to her. To make sure she was safe. That he hadn’t made a mistake letting her go down there alone with just her phone and the number of his lawyer.

But she’d insisted on going alone and he respected that.

Fuck.

His phone in his back pocket buzzed and he fished it out. His heart stopped when he saw it was a text from Annie.

I know about jail. I know what happened. It doesn’t change anything for me. It doesn’t change who you are. When this is done, when I am done…I’m going to come back to you. To hear the story from your lips. To finish what we started.

And then:

If you’ll have me.

Something like hope burned through him, igniting in his gut and blasting out through his fingers, the tips of his hair. And he landed squarely in his body again. Squarely inside himself.

And that hope-like thing crystallized into a happiness-like thing.

Part of him screamed out a warning, but he ignored it. He’d been living alone in his regrets for too long. He would not let Annie be another regret.

I do owe you a few more hours on your birthday wish, he texted back, but then erased it, because he didn’t need to try and make it seem like he wasn’t invested. Like he didn’t care.

Instead he wrote: Yes. I will always have you.

ANNIE

Yes. I will always have you.

I tucked my happiness, my glee, behind all my serious thick walls of worry. About my life. My future.

But that hope kept me lit up, and I felt like I glowed, like a lantern. The future was not entirely scary. Not entirely unsure. When the bad stuff was over, there was something good waiting for me.

Something amazing.

Dylan.

The door to my trailer was unlocked. I hadn’t had time last night to find my keys, much less lock up after myself.

Had it only been last night? Really?

How much time did it take for everything to change? I’d moved like a snail through my life before. So slow to know what I wanted. So slow to change. That was over now. I was changing with every breath I took.

I took the metal steps up into my trailer, set down my bag in front of the stove, and turned to shut the door. I slammed it hard the first time so it didn’t bounce.

“Hello, Annie.”

The voice stilled my blood. My lungs. The world swam around me. Instinctively I glanced back toward those captain chairs I never sat in, just to be sure that my exhausted, overwhelmed mind wasn’t playing tricks on me.

But there he was in his faded Wranglers and the dark short-sleeved shirt with the pearl snaps. His hat, sweat-stained and dusty, sat on the chair next to him.

Hoyt.

In my trailer.

The half second it took me to process what was happening was a half second too long, and by the time I was fumbling with the door trying to get it open, trying to get out, away, he was on me.

My arm was locked in his hand, his fingers pushing the nerves on its underside hard into the bone. Immediately my hand went numb. His other hand was so big that when it covered my mouth it partially covered my nose, too, and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t…breathe.

“Annie,” he whispered. That little smile on his face revealing the crooked eyetooth, the chipped incisor from his days in the rodeo. “Please don’t make this worse. I need…You need to be good,” he said. “And not scream. Can you do that for me? Be good for me?”

His breath smelled like coffee and Halls. He used to eat cough drops like candy, and the scent, familiar and nauseating, sent terror through me. My eyes rolled in my head and I strained away from him. I sank my teeth into the meat of his hand.

“That’s a no,” he said, his face turning hard and awful, and I knew what was coming.

Perhaps it had always been coming. Despite running. Despite that zigzagging escape. Despite this sudden belief that I’d committed to just hours ago to stand up to him, to demand he get off my land and pay for what he’d done.

This moment had been what was in store for me all along.

Some things we just can’t outrun.

He hit me so hard my head bounced against the edge of the stove.

And the world went dark.

For Adam. For everything.

Acknowledgments

My life is rich with friends who inspire and help me. My gratitude is endless.

To Maureen McGowan, Ripley Vaughn, and Stephanie Doyle: you are the foundation of so many great things in my life. Thank you.

To Bonnie Staring, Shari Slade, and Carolyn Crane: thank you for your comments and support—your input made the books so much better. I’m really honored to have you in my corner.

To the Toronto Romance Writers, the Western New York Romance Writers, and the Ottawa Romance Writers: your workshops and the resulting lightbulb moments I had made these books possible.

Simone St. James, between the beers and the writer’s retreats¸ we’ve got a good thing going.

Pam Hopkins, my agent—an amazing compass constantly pointing me in the right direction.

Shauna Summers, Gina Wachtel, Sarah Murphy, and the rest of the amazing team at Bantam: your hard work and faith in these books has been humbling and inspiring.

And to my readers: I am just so blessed. Thank you.

BY M. O’KEEFE

Everything I Left Unsaid

WRITTEN AS MOLLY O’KEEFE THE BOYS OF BISHOP NOVELS

Wild Child

Never Been Kissed

Between the Sheets

Indecent Proposal

CROOKED CREEK NOVELS

Can’t Buy Me Love

Can’t Hurry Love

Crazy Thing Called Love

About the Author

M. O’KEEFE can remember the exact moment her love of romance began; in seventh grade, when Mrs. Nelson handed her a worn paperback copy of The Thorn Birds. It wasn’t long before she was filling up notebooks with her own story ideas, featuring girls with glasses and talking cats. Writing as Molly O’Keefe, she has won two RITA awards and three RT Reviewers Choice Awards. She lives in Toronto, Canada, with her husband, two kids, and the largest heap of dirty laundry in North America. When she’s not writing, she’s imagining what she would say if she ever got stuck in an elevator with Bruce Springsteen.

molly-okeefe.com

Facebook.com/MollyOkeefeBooks

@MollyOKwrites

Annie and Dylan’s darkly emotional, wildly intense romance continues in the breathtaking sequel

Coming soon from Bantam Books

Continue reading for a sneak peek

ANNIE

Annie McKay came to slowly. Aware in pieces of her surroundings.

The pebbled linoleum of the trailer floor dug into her cheek. Her ankle was twisted, wedged against something hard.

The hot copper smell of blood made her stomach roil and she gagged.

“Annie, I’m sorry.”

That voice…oh God.

It was Hoyt. Her husband. Standing over her.

For heartbeats, lots of them, she wasn’t sure he was real. Perhaps she’d tripped and fallen, hit her head coming back into her trailer. She was hallucinating. Pulling Hoyt out of old nightmares. That made much more sense.

Because there was no way he could have found her here.

I was careful. I was so careful.

Two months ago, she’d run from him. Taking only the bruises around her neck and three thousand dollars from his safe. Desperate and scared, she left in the middle of the night and made her way in circles to this place. A patch of swamp called the Flowered Manor Trailer Park and Camp Ground in North Carolina.

Miles from Hoyt. From Oklahoma. From the farm where she’d lived her entire life.

And she’d been happy. The happiest she’d ever been. Not even two hours ago, she’d left Dylan and his magical house. Her body had been flush and alive and pleasured. And her mind had been clear.

She’d had plans, real plans, for her life, not just panicked and terrified reactions.

Everything had been about to get better.

“Annie?”

This is not a hallucination.

Be smart, Annie. Think!

“You hear what I said to you?”

She lay there silent. Hoyt hated her silence. Apologies were to be met with immediate acquiescence. His guilt immediately assuaged.

But she said nothing. Because fuck him.

“Get up.”

She kept her eyes closed, because she wasn’t ready to actually see him. Not here. Not in this trailer. Her home.

Hoping to feel her phone still in her back pocket, she rolled onto her back.

Please, please, she prayed, please be there.

But there was nothing under her butt. The phone was gone.

“There you go. It ain’t so bad, is it? Get yourself up off the floor.” He said it like she’d fallen, like she’d landed on the floor through her own clumsy, stupid means.

Despite her best efforts, hot tears seeped under her lashes.

“Come on now.” His hands touched her hip and her armpit to help her up and she flinched away; her body screamed in pain. Unsteady, she got herself to her feet. She opened her eyes and the world swam. She grabbed the edge of the table, landing half on, half off the cushion of the settee.

“You’re getting blood all over the place.” His familiar hands, with their small scars and close-clipped nails, held a pink washcloth toward her. It was the washcloth from her bathroom. He’d probably gone through everything, touching all of her things. Everything was contaminated now.

There was no way she could take the washcloth. Not from his hand.

“Fine,” he muttered, tossing the washcloth on the table. “Do it yourself.”

Pissy, he stomped off to sit in one of the captain’s chairs at the front of the trailer.

The reality of Hoyt being in this previously Hoytless place was shocking.

She forced herself to look at him. Really look at him.

He was a big man. Over six feet tall, and he used to rodeo when he was younger so his legs and arms and chest were thick with muscle. He had white blond hair that made his eyebrows and eyelashes nearly invisible, which gave his face a terrible expressionlessness. A vacancy. She’d never ever been able to tell what he was thinking.

Sincerity looked like deceit. Anger looked like forgiveness.

She used to think he was calm. Other people did too; at the very beginning of their marriage that’s what everyone said about him.

He’s so steady, they’d said. And she’d clung to that. With both hands and all her fear after Mom died. She’d clung to the version of him she wanted to believe in.

But it was a lie. Everything about him was a lie.

And Annie had been a fool.

That he was so totally the same, wearing what he always wore—jeans, his brown cowboy boots and the dark blue western shirt with the pearl snaps, his bone-handled knife in the sheath on his belt—made it even more surreal.

New place. Same nightmare.

Her missing phone was balanced on his knee. He’d taken it from her, gone through her pockets, while she lay unconscious on the floor.

Because he was an animal.

“I’m sorry,” he said with utter and terrifying sincerity. “I know at home, you were scared. What I did…that night in the kitchen?” He said it like she might have forgotten. “It was too much. I understand that.”

An incredulous laugh she could not let out stung her throat. Do you? Do you understand that?

“It won’t happen again. I swear it won’t.”

“How did you find me?” She tried to clear her vision, get her brain to focus.

“Do you believe me?” he asked. “That things will be different?”

No. Not in a million years.

“I believe you,” she lied, putting her heavy, throbbing head in her hand. “Just tell me how you found me.”

“It was actually pretty cool.” He smiled, with what she guessed was modesty, like she was about to be real proud of him. “The Bassett Gazette has this widget thing—that’s what they call them—on their website and it shows a map of the United States and on that map are little pins that track the places where people are logging on to the website. The gal I talked to at the office was real excited about it, said it showed that there were people all over the state reading their newspaper online. And there was this one dot…this one little dot that I started to follow. You know where that dot went?”

Sick to her stomach, she nodded. She thought she’d been so clever.

“It went around in circles for a while. And then it went north to Pennsylvania and then back south. And then it just stayed in Cherokee, North Carolina. Over and over again. Every few days it’d show up. Cherokee, North Carolina. Every week. Once a week. Tuesdays. That’s the day you liked to go shopping.” He said it like he was offering her proof of his affection. A nosegay. A dead bird dropped at her feet from his bloody jaws. “You thought I didn’t notice. But I did. You liked to shop on Tuesdays. So, I drove out here. I saw where you signed in for computer time at the library—Layla McKay. That’s your cousin, right?”

In one of the historical novels she’d read, there was a character who had a falcon. And Annie had loved the descriptions of how the guy flew his falcon and cared for it, the bells and the gloves and the little pieces of meat in a bag attached to his belt. And she’d thought, reading it, how great it would be to control something so barely domesticated. Something so very nearly wild.

But at this moment she realized how the falcon must have felt. So free one minute, wings spread, the world a retreating landscape below. The next, hooded and chained. Captured. Freedom a memory.

“I stayed there for a week, hanging out at the library. The grocery store. Driving by all the motels and…nothing. I heard about this trailer park out here and came out to investigate and I ran into this man, Phil, at a gas station. He told me all about the park. And when I described you, he told me he thought you might be here. You’re like his wife’s friend? I’m afraid Phil doesn’t like you much.”

God, brought down by Phil. How pathetically fitting.

“What do you want?” she asked, unable to pretend any longer.

He looked at her like he was surprised, his mouth gaping open, his translucent eyebrows halfway up his forehead. “I want you to come home,” he said. “I want you to be my wife again.”

“What does that even mean to you, Hoyt? Your wife? You don’t love me—”

He stood up from that chair and she shrank back in her seat.

“I apologized for what happened before you left. I can’t do any more than that. It’s time for you to come home now. You’ve had your fun. People are asking about you and I’m getting tired of the sideways glances. Everyone thinks I’ve done something to you. The police came out to the house two weeks ago. The police, Annie. It’s too much.”

He touched her hand before she could jerk it back. It was worse when he pretended to care. Or maybe he did actually care and he just didn’t know how to do it right.

“We can go back to church.”

Annie blinked up at him, unsure if he’d actually said that, or if she was hearing things.

“Annie? Would you like to go back to church?”

“Yes…of course,” she breathed. Three years ago she would have wept in gratitude. But she was not fooled now. He would let her go to church, once, maybe twice, and he’d find a way to take it away from her all over again.

“And then we’ve got to talk about selling that land to Encro.”

And there it was. That was really why he wanted her home. The land sale to Encro for more windmills. He couldn’t do it without Annie’s approval. That’s why this little scene was happening. “It’s time, don’t you think, that we thought of our future?”

My future is as far away from you as I can get.

“I forgive you for stealing from me, Annie. The money, the gun. It’s forgiven.”

Oh my God.

The gun.

The gun in her bedside table.

Did he have it? Was it still there?

She tried to show him nothing. Not one thing.

“I…I need to change my shirt.” Her spattered and torn sweatshirt was ruined with blood; it would never come clean. She’d had a few shirts like that at home. Clothes that made their way into the rag bag, or the garbage because the truth of her life was sprayed all over it.

Annie got up on shaky feet, her hand braced on the wall as she walked down the short hallway to the bedroom.

Please. Please be there. Please be there. That gun was her only chance.

She closed the door behind her and then, dizziness and headache aside, she nearly leaped over the bed to the small beside table and yanked open the drawer.

It was empty. Sobbing, she searched it, pulling it all the way out, but everything was gone. The books. The gun. The article about Ben. Everything.

She collapsed against the wall and fell to the floor.

The bedroom door creaked opened and Hoyt stood in the doorway. A blond devil. Her gun, like a toy in his great big palm.

In his other hand were her books. The sticky notes from Dylan. The artifacts of her rebellion. Of her entire life here.

Silent, he tossed the books onto the bed. The article. The notes.

She wanted to gather them up, out of his reach. Out of his sight. But it was too late. Everything she owned he’d ruined with his touch. She tipped her head so she couldn’t see them. Like a child, she thought if she couldn’t see them, they weren’t real.

They never happened.

All she had left was getting out of this.

“Who is Dylan Daniels to you?” he asked.

“No one. I don’t know who he is.” Annie got to her feet without any idea why she was lying when she was doing it so badly. All she knew was that she could not put Dylan in the middle of this nightmare.

“Stop.” He held up the phone, the screen showing all of their text messages. The picture she had sent of her nearly naked body. Her breasts and her tummy, the pale white blur of her thighs.

Annie had been unfaithful to a man who smacked her around over chicken pot pies. Strangled her over windmills. She could not imagine what he would do over adultery.

“I know about it all. So you need to stop lying. For your sake.”

He was going to kill her. A gasping sob cleared her throat.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he whispered. His face creased with agony. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Annie nearly laughed. But terror had squeezed her body.

“I don’t like it, Annie, but I…I guess I understand.” He tilted his head like the old yellow lab they used to have. “What I did to you made you…act out like that. I know that’s not you. That picture, those notes. That’s not the Annie I know.”

The Annie he knew was a rag doll. A scarecrow. An animated reflection of him. The Annie he knew was gone.

But Hoyt was still talking. “We can go back home and just forget it. Forget this Dylan Daniels. Start over.”

That was impossible. There was no forgetting Dylan Daniels. He was burned under her skin. Into her bones.

Move, she told herself, keep moving, don’t just sit here and let him ruin you again. As long as she kept moving she was alive, and as long as she was alive, there was a chance.

Annie pulled a clean shirt out of the dresser. “You mind?” she asked, when he just kept standing there. That gun held so casually in his hand as if to mock her fear.

A muscle twitched in his jaw and he glanced down at the books on the bed and the phone in his hand, silently asking if she really thought she was deserving of modesty now. But then he bowed his head and walked out of her room as if granting Annie some privacy was a favor. A silly stupid wish by a silly stupid woman.

Once he was gone, she pulled off her dirty shirt and slipped on her clean one. The windows in here were all too small to climb through, but she pushed open her curtains hoping Ben was still in his garden, hoping she could catch his eye. But his garden was empty. Joan’s trailer was still dark.

As lightly as she could, she stepped to the door, listening for sounds from the rest of the trailer so she could try to tell where he was. But it was silent. Eerie and silent and awful.

Shaking, she cracked open the door to see Hoyt back in the captain’s chair. He was eating a cinnamon roll from the bag she’d brought down from Dylan’s. If Annie was careful and if she was quick, she might get to the door before he did.

Acting as if she was still dizzy, she made her way into the small kitchen with her hand along the wall. Four feet. Three. Two. The door was right there. She paused for a second, holding her head as if she could barely stand. She needed him to think she was weak.

“You want to pack up?” He asked. “I’d like to get home. We’ve been gone too long.” Like they’d been on a trip. A fun excursion.

“Can we have some food, first? I need something to eat. It will make me less dizzy, maybe.”

She turned herself around a little, getting her body between him and the door, and then made like she was reaching for the paper bag but instead of the bag she reached for the door, pushing it open, cold air rushing toward her as she threw her body down the steps, but Hoyt grabbed the back of her shirt and then a handful of her hair and yanked her back into the trailer.

And then slammed the door shut.

Annie screamed so loud and so hard her throat ached and he backhanded her, tossed her onto the floor of the trailer and got down on top of her, squeezing the air from her body. His hand closed over her mouth. His knife had slipped forward and the leather tip of the sheath touched the bare skin of her hip, where her shirt had ridden up.

She tried to flinch away from it, but he was too heavy.

With every breath she took that knife rubbed her. Scratched her.

“Look at me, Annie,” he said in that calm voice. “I found you and we’re together again. There’s nowhere for you to go. And you need to realize that.”

She shook her head, trying to buck him off with her hips.

“This Dylan man, he’s not for you. And you know what? I forgive you for having an affair with this man.” His voice said otherwise. His voice and his narrowed eye and the vicious disgusted curl to his lip, they told her she would be paying for these sins. “Some kind of dirty affair. Sending a man who is not your husband a picture of your naked body. You—”

He shifted over her and she felt, to her utter horror, that he was hard under his zipper. This man who had so rarely had sex with her was aroused. She closed her eyes against this new awful terror.

The sheathed knife and his erection dug into her.

“This man you were screwing, did he knew you were married?”

Annie did not respond. Would not. He was playing some sick game. He touched her hair just above her ear, and she could have screamed.

“You smell dirty. Like sweat and sex.” He sniffed her. Over and over again, his nose in her hair. Her neck. “I want you to spread your legs, Annie.”

Whimpering, she clenched them tighter together.

I am going to die this way.

There was a sudden knocking on the door and both of them stilled. She opened her eyes in time to see a momentary flash of panic on Hoyt’s face. But as soon as it was there it was gone, replaced by that terrifying vacancy.

“Annie!” It was Ben. Old frail Ben. “You all right? I heard screaming.”

“Who is that?” Hoyt asked.

“My neighbor.” Ben Daniels. Dylan’s father. And…quite possibly, her only friend.

“You don’t want that man to get hurt.” The menthol smell of Hoyt’s breath flowed over her face. He ate Halls cough drops like candy. “And if you say one word to him, give him one reason to think you aren’t okay, he’ll get hurt. We’ll still be going home together, Annie. You cannot change that. No matter what you do.”

This whole situation was made worse by the fact that Ben was a former motorcycle gang member and convicted felon. Cops would take one look at her face, and Ben’s record, and they’d believe whatever Hoyt said.

Hoyt was very believable.

Bit by bit Hoyt got off Annie, watching her every second to see what she would do. Annie had become unpredictable, and she took some strength from that, from no longer being underestimated.

Shaking, she slowly got to her feet, grabbed the pink washcloth from the table and held it to her head. Hoping Ben would believe the lies she was about to tell him.

Hoyt got out of sight and Annie pushed open the door to her trailer.

“You all right?” Ben asked, looking worried. He wore the familiar clean white shirt, pristinely ironed. He’d been sick recently, and he’d lost weight. No matter how tough he’d been years ago, now he was frail and he was old.

And he could not help her.

“Fine,” she lied with a smile. “There was a snake and I screamed and jumped and smacked my head on the cupboard.”

“I get those king snakes all the time,” he said. “You want me…”

She got in his way as he leaned to the side as if to see into the trailer, or, worse, try to come in. “I’m fine.”

That lie didn’t sound at all convincing, and he pointed up to his own eye. “You smack your eye, too? Your lip?”

“Please,” she breathed, unable to pretend anymore. “Please, Ben, just go.”

“Annie—”

“For fuck’s sake, old man. I’m fine. I’m exhausted and I just want to get to sleep. Leave me alone.”

His dark eyes missed nothing and she had no idea what he was thinking, but in the end he surrendered, holding up his hands and going back to his trailer. Taking all hope of rescue with him.

Annie was going to have to do this herself.