CHAPTER 45
CARTER
I called Bart as soon as we got back to my house. I’d left Phin with his homework and Emily in the kitchen making coffee.
“The house is clear now,” Bart said. “But she was right. He was here. Her bedsheets are shredded.”
“I don’t want her to see that.”
“We can change them when LAPD leaves.”
“How did he get in?”
“He tried busting the keypad then climbed the fence. His mug’s on the recorder. I think he ate a hard-boiled egg. There’re shells on the counter. Unless she left them.”
“Yeah, no.” Emily wasn’t a slob. “Can you hang out there until I get back to you?”
“Sure.”
Letting a woman into my life was a problem I was figuring out slowly but surely, but now that everyone was in the same house, my house, I had an intractable problem. I never wanted to choose between my son and a woman. That possibility was always the fear. Now, here I was in the exact situation I was trying to avoid.
“Thanks, Bart.”
I couldn’t bring her back to her house with a broken security system and an active stalker. I couldn’t stay with her. I couldn’t bring Phin.
She stood at the sink, filling the teapot. I could see the shape of her shoulder blades through her shirt, and her ass was a perfect heart shape in her sweatpants. I got right behind her and put a hand on each cheek. I couldn’t help it. They fit over them perfectly. She was so tiny and tight.
“Carter,” she whispered sharply, “Phin’s right upstairs.”
I slid my hands around her waist. “What do you have in that bag?”
She turned, the full teapot between us. I pressed her against the counter.
“You’ll see.”
“When?”
“I don’t even know where I’m sleeping tonight.”
I pushed off the counter. Yeah, there was that.
“Bart checked out your house. It’s secure for now, but he was there.”
She turned to the stove. In the split second I could see her face, I saw it fall into a kind of resigned despair. She put the teapot on the burner and set the flame.
“I’m tired.” She spoke to herself, the teapot, the universe. I put my hands on her shoulders, but she shrank under my touch. “I don’t know how to live like this.”
“I’d offer to beat the hell out of him.”
“Didn’t you already do that?”
“Yeah. He’s stubborn.”
It’s one thing to feel like you’re restrained from doing what you want to do to protect someone. It’s another thing entirely to have done that thing and seen it fail. Having gone to the ultimate solution first, I now had to backtrack to the things that always seemed like ineffective first steps.
“I’m out of ideas.” She adjusted the teapot a quarter turn.
“We can get LAPD in to investigate breaking and entering. At least we can get the order of protection renewed.”
She sighed and looked at the ceiling. “Sure.” She turned and looked at the floor as if she couldn’t meet my eyes.
Suddenly, like a flash flood in my heart, I rebelled against her compliance. I fought her sighs and shrugs. I hated her exhaustion and her forbearance. No. Just no. She wasn’t meant to live like this. She was meant to dance and laugh. She was built to be loved, not to be so emotionally beaten she forgot how to care.
“Emily.”
“Yeah.”
“Look at me.”
She wasn’t crying. Her eyes were as dry as my mouth. As if she’d borne so much and this was just another day where the rug got pulled out from under her. I held up my hands. It wasn’t to hold her back or calm her down but to put the brakes on the unstoppable flow of my impulsive words.
It didn’t work.
“Nothing is going to happen to you as long as I can stand on these two feet. As long as I can breathe, you’re safe. You are under my protection. Let me say it again so you understand what it means when I say that. There’s Phin, and there’s you. You are my business. Your safety and . . . no, not just your safety. Your happiness, your comfort, your well-being . . . I’m taking the responsibility for those things off your plate. It’s all on me.”
She bit her lip between her teeth and looked down at the floor again. I tipped her chin so she had to look at me.
“You are under my protection.”
“I can’t do that to you.” What was dry was now wet. Her mouth got sticky when it moved, and her eyes filled. “You have enough.” She flipped her hand toward the door, and I knew she was talking about Phin. “I know why you didn’t want to get involved. You can’t take your eyes off him, and that’s the right way. He should be your first priority.”
“I can do both.”
She shook her head, and I let her chin go. She brought her knuckles to her mouth as if she could grasp her sobs and throw them away.
“I don’t know, Carter. It’s too much. I hate being a burden. And don’t say I’m not. Nothing you say is going to make that go away.”
“Listen. Can you listen?”
“Sure.”
“I can get you an emergency restraining order.”
She pointed her left toe perpendicular to the floor. The arch of her foot curved at an extreme angle I wanted my lips to experience.
“And I guess I stay here?”
“You get to watch Phin.”
“Good. I like him.”
“I don’t want you to worry about anything.”
“I am worried. Mostly, I’m worried that you and I are supposed to be getting to know each other, and instead I’m your job.”
“I love my job.”
It was too soon to say anything like that, but it was true.
I kissed her before she could object or confirm, and she pushed against me. Her fingers ran through the hair on the back of my neck, and I dug my hands under the back of her shirt.
“Uh, hey?” We separated at the words and found Phin poking his head in. “I’m getting on the internet to research. Go on with whatever you were doing.”
“Wait,” I said as he was trying to get away. “I have to go somewhere. Emily’s going to hang out with you.”
“Okay.” His cartoonish effort to look nonchalant made him seem completely disrupted. He ran off.
“He’s a little . . .” I drifted off.
“Normal?”
“Just a little.”
“Go, please. If you still need to go, just go.”
I kissed her one more time and left.