Chapter
8
Annabelle
As I crossed the parking lot to where my truck was parked, a familiar voice called my name from behind me.
“Belle! Hold up a second!” Bobby jogged towards me while I stood there with my arms crossed waiting for him.
Sometime over the past week, the anger I had been carrying towards Bobby had started to melt away. Then, after he’d apologized two nights ago for leaving me back in Sylvania and we’d made love yesterday morning, all I was left with was the pesky guilt. Guilt and regret. Yet, I wasn’t allowing myself to look at the regret too closely. I couldn’t really afford to let myself to.
Bobby came to a stop in front of me. I couldn’t help cringing a little at his anger. Avoiding him like the plague yesterday after sneaking out of his room probably wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had, but it was exactly what I’d done. After having a beautiful moment happen between us in his room—especially without a condom and all of the possible repercussions of that, which I was refusing to think about—I needed some time and space to put myself back together. Fidgeting nervously, I shoved my hands in my pockets.
Now it was his turn to cross his arms over his chest. Only his stance didn’t scream self-preservation like mine had. His body language said he was mad at my disappearing act and determined to get answers.
“I know you’re busy and all, but I was hoping you’d like to have dinner with me sometime.” I started to protest, but he grabbed my upper arms gently to stop me from speaking. “Wait a minute. Hear me out for a second. I’m not asking for much here, Belle. Only a chance for the two of us to go somewhere together so I can have the opportunity to apologize. Maybe explain a few things. I think that’s the least you owe me after the way you left me yesterday.”
Turning my head to look at my truck, I thought it over. Declan’s plea echoed in the back of my mind; the one where he asked me to let Bobby apologize so he could move on with his life. The knowledge that I needed to tell Bobby about Seth churned in my gut. When he found out he had a son, Bobby would unquestionably go on with his life. My fear, now, was that he was going to take my son when he left and I didn’t know if I could survive that.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to let Bobby have his say now. If I accepted his apology and explanation, he could shut down his thoughts of rekindling something between us before I told him about Seth. It might even minimize his pain if he was already under the conclusion there was no hope for the two of us. Give him some closure and I could see now, as he was looking at me with all that hope in his eyes, he needed it. Maybe it wouldn’t be so horrible if I could at least give him that. Lord knew I was ultimately responsible for our situation more than he was.
However, it was a Friday night and there was no way I was going to go to dinner with Bobby on what most would consider a date night. This needed to be something a bit more casual. Definitely more emotionally safe than anything that might be misconstrued as romantic.
“How about lunch today, instead? There’s a small Mom & Pop place in Poteet where I stop to eat a lot.”
Bobby beamed back at me. “That would be great. Want to leave now?”
“Yeah, let’s go. Get in the truck.”
~~~
Bobby
A short time later, Belle and I sat across from each other in a small booth in the back of the restaurant. Although the small diner had a bright and cheery down home atmosphere, I couldn’t help wiping my sweaty palms over the top of my jeans. I watched as Belle generally avoided eye contact with me. Staring down at the blue and white checkered tablecloth, she aimlessly ran her fingers over the condensation on the outside of her water glass.
Not sure how to start this conversation, I glanced around the restaurant. A tiny vase of wildflowers sat on the end of the table against the wall partition. Customers talked amongst each other as waitresses ran around with trays full of food.
As I was ready to break up the thickening silence between us, a petite woman in a cornflower blue uniform walked up. Her dark hair was in pig tails and she couldn’t have been more than nineteen-years-old. Quickly, she recited the specials of the day before sweetly asking what we would be having.
My stomach was in knots. I didn’t think I could eat much without having to worry if it would come back up at any given moment, so I stayed on the safe side and only ordered two cheeseburgers with a side of home style fries and a large sweet tea. Belle ordered the club sandwich and a diet coke. Awkward silence fell again after the waitress left to place their order.
Looking up, I caught Belle looking at me with a slightly amused expression.
Curiosity got the best of me.
“What’s that look for?”
She let out an unfeminine snort. “You still eat like a horse on steroids, don’t you?”
Shrugging my shoulders, I told her, “That was nothing. I usually eat way more than that.”
Belle’s eyebrows jacked up to her hair line.
I felt like a scared teenager, which was ridiculous. I was a thirty-three-year-old, highly trained soldier. One small woman with an outrageous hour glass body should not be able to tie me up in a thousand knots like this. My throat felt almost clogged and I was starting to wonder if the words were ever going to be able to work themselves out. You’d think I’d be a bit more pissed off at her after the trick she’d pulled yesterday morning, but I couldn’t bring myself to be mad at her. It was probably due to the fact she was still upset from me leaving her and didn’t know how to deal with it. I’d have to show her I didn’t plan on going anywhere or leaving her this time. Belle sat across from me still staring at me like I was an alien who ate small children for breakfast. Deciding to take advantage of her unusually quiet demeanor, I made solid eye contact with her and decided to get it over with.
Nervously, I blurted, “I’m sorry. Words can’t even express how sorry I am. I don’t want to give you any lame excuses. Simply the truth. Here it goes. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that letter to you. My mind was in a funny place with this new, almost overwhelming, world around me. I started second guessing everything in my life. Then my buddy found out his wife had slept with his brother after we had arrived at our Advanced Training School. In a weak moment, it made me wonder about us, too.”
I quickly grabbed her hands in my own when she looked ready to hit me. “Not that I thought you would cheat on me, or vice versa. More like, I was scared for a brief moment you’d regret marrying me at such a young age. That you would come to resent me for not seeing more of the world outside of our relationship than you had.”
“That’s when I wrote the letter. About two weeks after I wrote it, I realized what a monumental mistake it was. I was panicked because we weren’t always allowed to make phone calls, so I wrote a letter to Mom and Dad asking them to find you for me. I’d included a separate letter for them to give you, telling you that I was the world’s biggest idiot for doing what I did, telling you how much I love you, asking you to forgive me, asking you for forever again.”
“The problem was Mom and Dad couldn’t find you. When I was able to call them about a week later, they said no one had seen you around. They looked for months. I called everyone I knew back home, trying to find you. Everyone told me it was like you up and disappeared.”
Belle pulled her hands out of mine so my thumbs no longer drew little circles on her skin. Folding her hands on the table, Belle squeezed them together tightly. The tips of her fingers went bloodless and it was the only outward sign she gave me that she was trying her best to hide how shaken she felt inside.
“What did you expect me to do, Bobby? Stay in Sylvania? A town that loved to rub my face in the knowledge that I was born on the wrong side of the trailer park? Stay where those stuck up pageant queens could remind me how I had no business dating you? A good boy from a respectable family. Perhaps you expected me to stay with that dickhead father of mine so he could beat me into the ground like he did my mom. Teagan was already long gone. There was nothing left for me there.”
I covered Belle’s shaking hands with my own again. “No, Belle. I understand why you left. I honestly do. It tore me to pieces when I couldn’t find you. To fix what I had done. Please don’t get upset. That’s not what my goal was today.”
One of Belle’s delicate eyebrows popped up again. “What are your goals today, Bobby?”
Inhaling a shaky breath, I looked down at our hands as I started to rub my thumb back and forth over her knuckles. “I don’t know. Apologize. Explain. Maybe beg you to forgive me. Hope you’d be interested in giving me another chance. Tell you that you’re still mine. Last, but not least, get some answers so I can understand things a bit better.” I glanced back up to see regret on Belle’s pretty face.
Her face drained of color and she whispered, “What answers are you looking for? You said you understood why I left.”
“I get that you wouldn’t stay with your dad. My parents told me about the fresh bruise on your face the day you showed up at their house and they gave you my letter. I understand why you would feel like you wouldn’t have anywhere else to go since Teagan was gone. What I don’t understand is why you moved halfway across the country to Texas. I also don’t understand why you changed your last name to Roberts. You changing your last name is probably the reason why my private investigators couldn’t find you all of these years. It had to be an under the table job, too, since, if it was done legally, they would have caught the court records of your name change in any searches they had done. How about you explain those things?”
She looked up at the ceiling for a moment before responding to me.
“Look, Bobby, I appreciate you explaining everything to me. I really do. The apology means a lot, too. Maybe if I hadn’t left Sylvania and moved on with my life, things would be different for us now. The thing is, though, I did leave. Moved on from the past. Where my life sits now… I don’t think it’s a good idea to try and pick up where we left. There are aspects of my life that you probably wouldn’t be able to handle. We had it good while we had it and, with the hurt and the anger gone now… maybe we can look back at the past to appreciate that what we had was special. We were each other’s first loves. We’ll always have that.”
She was emotionally pulling away from me again and I didn’t like it one bit. Squeezing her hand, I did my best to hide my disappointment. “You weren’t just my first love, Belle. You were my only love. There hasn’t been a woman since that has touched me to the core the way you did. I know, without a doubt, there won’t be anyone in the future that can do it, either.”
A look of guilt passed over Belle’s face again and, as she opened her mouth to say something, the waitress stopped at the table to drop off our food. I watched an inscrutable wall go up around Belle’s features. It looked as though she was done talking for the time being. Well, that was too damn bad. She was going to give me answers before we left here, whether she liked it or not. I’d give her a few minutes to think she’d won this battle, but then, I was going to do whatever it was that I had to do to show her it was only a small battle she’d won. I was damn well going to win the war and my reward would be her love.
Halfway through our meals I switched gears. “Why did you change your last name?”
Cocking her head to the side, she asked, “What else do you know about what happened before I left? You said your mom and dad told you about a bruise. Did they tell you anything else?” Shaking my head no, I waited for her to elaborate. Taking a slow sip of her drink, she put it down and then calmly continued, “I got that bruise because Daddy came home drunk again. He was yelling at me about something and I didn’t have a clue about what he was talking about. When he hit me hard enough I hit the floor, I saw an empty whisky bottle of his lying underneath the coffee table. He was still standing over me, accusing me of something I hadn’t done, and all I thought was, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ So, I slowly reached over with my hand, grabbed the neck of that bottle, and when he leaned over, about to hit me again, I swung with everything I had. Clocked him right in the head.” She gave a short pretend swing with her arm over the table to emphasize her point.
“I would say I don’t know who it scared more, me or him, but since he was sprawled out on the floor with blood pouring from his head—not moving—I’m going to say it was me because, for a few moments, I thought I’d killed him. I finally worked up the courage to check his pulse, which he had, and then I realized when he came to he was probably going to kill me. I grabbed his truck keys and I ran scared to your parents’ house. I was going to ask to stay with them.”
The silence was damning. She didn’t need to say the next part because I already knew what it was. And then I got your letter.
She heaved a sigh. “After I left your parents’ house, I drove around for a little while trying to figure out what I was going to do. I knew I couldn’t stay with him anymore, but I knew I didn’t have anywhere else to go in the county. That’s when it hit me. I’d been saving up all my spare money from working for when we got our place together, so I could help you buy furniture and stuff. That money was my salvation. There wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to pay for a bus ticket and keep me fed sparingly for a couple of weeks until I landed somewhere and got a job. I drove home, hoping Daddy was still unconscious, that maybe I could pack my bags and leave before he came to, and instead I found him outside of our trailer, talking to the Sheriff’s Deputies. He’d called the cops on me.” Shaking her head in disgust, she said, “He was standing there with a bloody washcloth to his head, talking to the Deputies about how I’d hit him. Can you believe that?
“Luckily, none of them saw the truck before I would have turned into the trailer park, so I was able to get away, but I had to go hide his car so no one could find me. Once I lost his truck, I hoofed it back to the trailer, staying unnoticed by walking through the woods instead of on the roads, and waited until I watched him leave when one of his buddies picked him up. I waited for a while to make sure he was gone for good and then I broke into the house, packed up my shit in a bag, grabbed my cash, and left without looking back. When I finally made it to the bus station, I asked the lady where the first bus was going and she told me Texas.”
Spreading her hands wide in front of her, she continued, “So here I am. When I got here fifteen years ago, a homeless guy told me about a shelter I could sleep in; that’s where I headed. A social worker came in a few days after I’d shown up at the shelter, took one look at my bruises and decided to be my guardian angel. She was an older woman who’d apparently lost her daughter due to domestic violence. After that, she made it her life’s mission to help out women running from that kind of violence. She moved me into her home, had someone change my name so Daddy couldn’t find me, and helped me get on my feet.”
Clearing the knot from my throat, I asked, “Where is this woman now?”
“Miss Reba died ten years ago from cancer. She lived long enough to help me through some seriously rough shit and saw me get my college degree before she finally passed. One of the best people I’ve ever met in my life.”
A stranger had been there for Belle when I’d abandoned her. What would have happened had Miss Reba not taken Belle in? Would her father have caught up with her? Would she have survived the kind of creeps that sometimes frequented places like shelters to target those weaker than them? It was a fucking miracle she’d made it out of all of that alive. Alive and alone because I’d left her when she needed me the most. There was at least one thing I could tell her that might make it better.
“Did you hear from your dad after you left Georgia?” She shook her head. “The cops never came after you?” She shook her head again. “Have you bothered to check on your father’s whereabouts since then?” She shook her head a third time.
“Then I can tell you that you don’t have to worry about it anymore. Your dad died seven years ago. He was driving home drunk and wrapped himself around a tree. They didn’t find the wreck or his body for at least a week after it happened and my parents told me the Medical Examiner was quoted in the papers as saying he’d bled to death from his injuries. My parents sat outside of the cemetery waiting to see if you showed up so they could be there for you.”
Her eyes widened, her fingers gripped the edge of her table, and she sat there in shock for a few minutes. After staring sightlessly at the table, she whispered, “He can’t hurt me anymore.”
I knew she wasn’t necessarily talking to me, but I whispered back anyway, “No, baby, he can’t hurt you anymore.”
She looked back up at me, nodded her head, then picked up her sandwich and took a bite. We sat quietly eating the rest of our food, paid for our meals, and then headed back to the hotel. I knew why she was speechless. I’d dropped the mother-load of an emotional bomb on her and she needed time to absorb all of that. I could give her time for that. It was when she was trying to push me away and shut me out that I refused to give in.
As Belle stopped the truck at the front entrance, she turned in her seat to face me. “Lunch was nice, Ace. Thanks for the talk, as well as the apology. There’s something else we need to talk about real soon, but after hearing about my dad, I need some time to myself today. Before I go, though, I’ve got to be honest with you. I’ve got someone in my life that makes it impossible for us to patch things up. I’m sorry. We can move on to being friends, though—if you want—when all of this is over.”
I hung my head as a wave of pain ripped through my chest. Friends? She wanted to be fucking friends? All because she had a man in her life? Where was this someone in her life yesterday morning when I’d been so deep inside her that I wasn’t sure where she begun and I ended? I’d be damned if I was going to let her ignore what we had and try to categorize me as a friend. Without thinking, I reached over to snag the back of her neck, bringing her closer to me. Before Belle could protest, I slammed my lips down onto hers, kissing her senseless.
She gasped in surprise and I took the opportunity to thrust my tongue into her mouth. I put all of my love, frustration, pain and desire into our kiss. Sliding my tongue against hers, causing her to moan at the touch. My brain felt fried as a burning sensation traveled through my entire body at the simple touch. Sparks ignited behind my eyelids and I knew, without a doubt, that no one had, or ever would, feel like this to me again. Belle’s hands fisted the fabric of my shirt. When my head was swimming from lack of oxygen, I finally pulled back enough to break our kiss. Foreheads still touching, lips hovering over hers, breath sawing harshly in and out of my chest.
“Friends don’t kiss like that, baby. You can’t tell me this is something you really want to walk away from. No man will ever love you like I do.”
She was silent for a second, but when her voice came out, it was hoarse with a slightly choked sound. “You can’t know that, Ace. Someone may come along for you in time and, whoever it is, she’ll make you happy. You’ll move on.”
Shaking my head in denial, I rasped, “No, Belle, you’re wrong. No one will ever make me feel the way I do when I’m with you. I know this with the certainty that the sun will set today and rise again tomorrow. The kind of certainty when the moon rises and the stars blink in the sky that they’ll all still look way too dim to me. They’ll always look too dim because you are the brightest star in my life and without you, everything else seems cloudy. I only seem to see things clearly when you’re around and I know all of that because you are my soul.”
Not giving Belle time to make another reply, I hopped out of the passenger side, slamming the door before stalking towards the hotel. Looking back over my shoulder, I watched her rev up the truck and shoot out of the parking lot like hell was hot on her heels. A throat cleared in front of me. Turning to face the sound, I found Agent Boyd watching me closely.
“That was some kiss there, Baker. You guys patch things up?”
I hung my head at the fresh onslaught of pain threatening to tear what was left of my heart and soul into pieces. “No, we didn’t. She says it’s time for me to move on and there’s a man in her life that makes it impossible for us to try.”
Boyd’s eyebrows shot to his hairline seconds before his look of surprise turned into a look of anger, complete with a face flushed so red I was tempted to check his blood pressure. He scoffed, “A man, huh? I tell you what, Baker. You want to know what’s keeping Annabelle from you?”
My body coiled tight. I barely resisted the urge to grab Boyd and shake him silly while demanding answers to all of his questions. “Hell, yeah, I do. What do you know that I don’t, Boyd?”
“Be sure, Baker. I mean it. Be damn sure about this because once you know, you can’t go back.”
“What the fuck, Boyd? Yes! I want to know.” Pounding a fist on my chest, I declared, “Belle means everything to me. The damn woman is too stubborn to give me another chance.”
“Alright. You got anybody on this little team of yours that you’re close to? Anyone who’s a good friend?”
“We’re all like brothers, so, yeah. Why?” I was doing my damnedest to figure out where the hell Boyd was going with all of this.
“Look,” Boyd ran his hand through his hair in agitation, “just grab someone you trust to have your back and meet me here at seven-thirty. You’ve got to follow me. Don’t ask any questions until we get to our destination, okay?”
I looked at Belle’s partner like he’d lost his damn mind. That was like asking a soldier to go into a mission with a blindfold on. A sense of unease skirted down my spine, but no matter the strong sense of unease, hope sprang deep inside of me. “This will explain why Belle’s holding back on me?”
Boyd nodded. “Yeah. That and a lot more. Meet me at seven-thirty and, whatever you do, don’t tell Belle about this if you talk to her. She’d kick your ass. Then, she’d kick mine. My wife doesn’t like it when Belle kicks my ass, either, because she leaves bruises, literally.”
He stormed out of the hotel lobby before I could ask any more questions. Whatever. Boyd had promised an in to Belle’s unwillingness to fix what was between us. I would take all the help I could get. Even if the small voice in the back of my head told me this was going to end badly.