Bethany
The weight of his silence battered at the room. In her mind's eye, she imagined the paint peeling, ceiling sagging in response to the oppressive atmosphere. Raw and agonized emotion bared on his features brought her to tears, and she lifted a hand, palm up, as if that could stop the waves of disappointment. She knew how he felt, and knowing gutted her. "I am what they made me." His words tore through her and wrenched her to her knees. "I cannot be anything else." Head bowed, she slowly crept towards him until she felt the heat from his body radiating out. Fingers working at the fastenings of his jeans, eyes to his face, she released him and waited. It felt like the touch of an angel, the grace of pardon when he cupped the back of her head, guiding her mouth to his cock.
Bethy’s eyes opened and she stared up at the dark ceiling, fighting for breath, every nerve in her body firing. The sensation so similar to the moment Judge had tasered her, Bethy found her muscles locked tight, and for an instant, she was too terrified to move. Just in case.
The dream had taken her by surprise. Right after coming back, she’d dreamt of Gabe often. Her brain refused to call him by his club name, and most of her memories of Derek had been buried for years, so Gabe was how she thought of him. Back to our roots.
Pulling up an image of him in her head, she compared the Gabe of now to the boy she’d known, still shocked she hadn’t made the connection. Might never have made it without Sarge’s voice in the dark, drawing lines between past and present in an undeniable way.
Derek. A thing the prosecutor had said about how the lies of Kentucky had invaded the courtroom made sense now. At the time, she’d held onto hope it meant Derek wasn’t guilty, but now, she wondered if it was because he knew who she was at the time, even trying to hide behind her married name.
God. So many layers. Anger at Davy for not being there when she needed him had pushed her to reject the name they shared, and it was only after their nephew kidnapped her that she took ownership back, introducing herself to Benny Jones with a hyphenated name.
Maybe it’s time to ditch the Taylor part. She pulled in a startled breath when her door creaked, swinging slightly as the air conditioning kicked on, dark shadows leeching into her room from the hallway. “You agree with me, right?” Her question asked the air, because she’d been alone in the apartment since coming back from Texas. Ty had left Sarge’s cabin and gone to communal housing where he had access to other veterans and more intensive therapy than she’d ever been able to make him accept.
Turning to her side, she ignored the aching throb between her legs, a reminder of her dream. Gabe had been in the military too. Maybe he brought back more than she knew about. Dot’s pictures of Ty before enlisting were more a match for the Gabe she remembered. Tall and lean, where now he was muscled and bulky. He’d often called it his armor for what might come after him.
Maybe Gabe’s behaviors are his armor? He’d confessed, preventing a drawn-out trial, keeping her out of the papers, because she would have had to testify. It helped her keep things from Davy, too. Still, there were his words at the prison. Maybe that was more deflection, not wanting her to come and see him, not wanting her to wait. Or maybe he faked that, too.
Bethy flopped to her back, shoving the sheet and blankets to the foot of the bed, impatient with the confinement. In Texas, Gabe had his own set of defenses. He’d hidden behind protocol of the club and the demands of her brother.
Except in bed. As both Derek and Fury, Gabe had shown a tenderness and care that she didn’t think could be false. He likes me. His text messages were a smokescreen, like his words to her through the jailhouse phone so many years ago. She reached up and twitched the curtains to one side, staring up at the winking stars. Please let me be right. With a sigh, she closed her eyes, letting her hand fall back to the bed beside her. In Texas, everything he’d done had been with her well-being in mind. Before they slept together, before he’d taken a rescued Bella to Chicago…she could look back and see where she’d come first. I think he likes me.
She smiled, skin heated from the vision of him moving over the top of her, hands cradling her face while he stared into her eyes as if he needed to memorize something important. Maybe more.
Hours passed as she lay there, running every conversation she could remember through her head. Gabe, Derek, Fury—she passed each word through the sieve of what she knew now. As Gabe, he’d been the near-brother to her best friend, an ever-present protector she and Tabby both depended on after Mason left the holler. But her memories of him then were tied up in the doings of things. A grin flashed alongside a creek as they collected crawdads, the weight of his arm across her shoulders when she found out Davy had left.
When he was Derek, the memories were more complex. Remembered tension between them had been colored by the outcome for so long, it was hard to pick the threads of that lens away, leaving her the moments that lay between. His startled laughter when she gave an unexpected answer during their first dinner together, hand darting out to cover hers then yanked back as if her touch was acid. That avoidance giving way over the course of the evening to an incredible connection she’d embraced, and he had clearly fought. Fought and lost. He didn’t come to me with the intent of seduction. After examining their moments together, that much was clear. There’d been a plan of wooing, but he had not intended for them to wind up in bed together.
The same in Lamesa when he came to her as Fury. He had kept his distance for days, treating her like an unwelcome chore assigned by a project manager. In many ways, she guessed that much was truth, because Davy had set him on her. Davy can’t know who he is, she thought, and that awareness gave her a moment of toe-curling terror. Because if Davy didn’t know and eventually realized, then found out what had happened in Nashville, he would be…furious was probably too small a word. He’ll kill him.
Even after coming back from his trip with Bella, Gabe hadn’t intended for them to sleep together. That was all me. He’d held her as she came apart, lost in the nightmare of her memories, willing to stay with her through the worst of it. If there’d been any seduction in that hotel room, it had come from her side of things. He’d even asked her more than once if she’d been certain it was what she wanted. Once they were in bed, and even before—after she’d been able to clearly articulate her definite interest—he had been all-in, fully present in the moment. Exactly like he’d been with me before. Tenderness covered his fierce hunger like a thin veneer of civilized, but she had no doubts sleeping with her had been on his mind. He’d admitted as much. He just wasn’t going to act on it. Either time.
Outside influences. The idea trailed through her head, and she turned to her side, tucking her hands under the pillow. In Nashville, he had conned her out of money, pretending to be something he wasn’t. But in bed, he’d shown her exactly who he was. It had been a lot of money she couldn’t easily afford to lose like that, but she’d made it through okay. No lasting damage. He’d gone to jail, paid for it with five years of his life. A bad exchange on his end, no doubt. When he’d gotten out, he hadn’t come to her. Hadn’t found her and explained or apologized, but—Bethy snorted, I would’ve shot him on sight back then—it was probably a good thing.
The lessons had been hard but served her to this day when she approached negotiations. Not that I’m excusing his behavior. But without that experience to guide her, there were a dozen more situations that would have been even more costly, both emotionally and monetarily. Never again had become an instinctive mantra, repeated until it was an embedded part of her psyche.
In Texas, he had again clearly set out to deceive her about his identity. Who wouldn’t? He had no idea how she’d dealt with things, and she knew from talking to Chase that the man Fury had worked his ass off to get into her brother’s club. If she’d recognized him, it would have screwed everything up for him. Self-preservation because of outside influences. Am I justifying what he did because I want more? She didn’t think so. There was only one way to find out. Road trip.
“I need to talk to Davy anyway, telling him about Michael needs to be a face-to-face conversation.” She rolled to her back, eyes adjusting to the faint light easing into the room around the curtains. Reaching up she twitched them aside again, the breaking dawn not quite erasing the brightest stars in the sky. Please make Davy not kill him.