Chapter 19

If only sarcasm burned calories.

-T-shirt

Tate

I was angry.

Very, very angry.

Today had been shit.

First learning about Ariya and her daughter. Then going into a situation that nearly had me getting killed. Then, I’d taken the dog to the vet and heard that it was likely he wouldn’t survive because not only was he malnourished, but he also had heartworms. It was so severe that if he’d been left there like he had been, he would’ve died in a matter of days.

After paying the vet and making sure they did what they could, I walked out and found that I’d been left.

Which wasn’t even that bad, to be honest. I’d been in the vet for an hour. I’d expected to find her in the waiting room, but she hadn’t been. Then, I’d decided that it was unfair to ask her to wait when she’d already taken me all the way over there.

Though, I hadn’t thought that she’d do that.

I’d thought, for sure, that she’d still be there waiting.

So I’d gone in search of her once I’d gotten a ride from Travis of all people.

Once he’d dropped me off, I’d gone directly to Hennessy’s house only to find her not there, but a fucking For Rent sign out front.

Pairing that with the fact that I’d gotten new patient papers from another psychologist a couple of towns over, I was fit to be tied.

Seriously, if she were there right then, I’d demand to know what in the hell had happened in the last twenty-four hours to cause her to lose her damn mind.

I started to work on the house, and lost track of time. In fact, it was nearly two in the morning before I realized that I’d been at it all night, and hadn’t stopped for food or anything to drink in nearly eight hours.

Once I’d made it to the kitchen, I looked out the window over the sink as I downed a glass of tap water, and my eyes narrowed when I saw her car.

It wasn’t parked in the normal spot. It was parked on the side of her house, nearly hidden unless you were standing exactly where I was standing.

My jaw went tight as I narrowed my eyes.

That little shit.

I slammed my empty glass on the counter with a thud and exited the house seconds later.

The moment my boots hit the front porch, I tried the knob.

Locked.

Pulling out my lock picking kit—a handy tool that I’d found worked great when I was trying to get through locks and gates to get to a car—and deftly opened her door without a second thought.

The lights were all out when I entered, and I paused at the door as I relocked it to help my eyes adjust.

The moment I saw all the packing boxes, my anger returned ten fold.

How was she just going to leave, when I knew for a fact she loved this fucking house, as well as the area?

Which blinded me to the fact that the moment that I’d locked the door, Hennessy had started toward me with a freakin’ baseball bat of all things.

She swung, I heard the whistle of the wood in the air as it tried to connect with my head, and turned at the last moment so that it connected with my shoulder rather than my head.

“What the fuck, Hennessy?” I cried out.

The wood bat hit the floor.

“Tate?” she asked in confusion. “God, what are you doing breaking into my house?”

I didn’t answer her, instead shooting back a question of my own. “Why do you have a ‘For Rent’ sign in your front yard?”

She hissed at me. “You can’t just walk in here like you own the place!”

I ground my teeth together. “You left me at the vet’s office, too. Made me hitchhike home.”

“I didn’t make you do anything. You’re a grown man. You could’ve called a cab,” she sneered.

Where was all this anger coming from? What had I done to her to make her this pissed off?

“Is this because of Ariya?”

She inhaled loudly. “No.”

“Liar,” I countered back.

She growled under her breath. “You’re so freakin’ annoying. Though knowing you have a daughter with some other person that isn’t me kind of sucks, I’ll get over it. It’s not like we had anything going on anyway.”

“It’s not like we…” I paused. “We did have something going.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?” she countered.

I gritted my teeth. “Yes, it fucking matters. You and me aren’t done. And you’re not moving out of your house.”

She laughed in my face and bent over to pick up the baseball bat. “Get out of my house. Oh, and stop using your goddamn saw in the middle of the night.”

I froze, surprised to hear her let a curse word past those lovely lips.

“You cursed,” I pointed out.

She laughed humorlessly. “Go away.”

Instead of going away, I moved forward, snatched her up by the waist, and moved her until her entire body was flattened between mine and the wall.

“How about you check the attitude and tell me what’s going through that crazy head of yours,” I snapped.

My cock started to stiffen at feeling her lush ass so close, and it took me a moment to realize that she’d spoken.

“What?” I asked, unsure of what she said.

“You heard me, dammit. I told you that I can do anything you can do.”

I blinked. “Okay.”

What was I supposed to say to that?

“Okay?” she shrieked. “Just okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

She growled. “You don’t think I can do the things you do, do you?”

Well, no. But that’s just because she’d never done them before. I had no doubt that if she put her mind to it, she could do anything she wanted.

“That’s not what I said,” I started. “What I said was…”

“What you said was that you think that I’m inferior, useless, and a waste of space.”

My entire being stilled, and I realized instantly that what I was dealing with now was a wound not made by me, but by a man that was supposed to protect the heart he had control of. By a man that you were supposed to trust with everything.

Hennessy, however, couldn’t. She didn’t even realize that what she had was rotten, and I wasn’t sure if she still understood it.

I did.

I could see that she was ready to fight me over something imaginary that she heard, and that imaginary thing only solidified what she’d already been leaning towards since she’d found out about my fictitious child.

“Hennessy,” I said carefully. “Did your father tell you that you were a waste of space?”

I said it so controlled, I hoped, that none of my anger toward her father bled through.

This was something I was going to have to step around carefully.

There were so many booby traps that her father had been responsible for that I didn’t know where to step without permanently damaging something pivotal.

“My father told me a lot of things,” she laughed humorlessly. “What else do you want to know about how awful he used to be to me?”

My belly clenched, and anger started to ignite in my blood.

That stupid fool she called a father was a sorry excuse for one. Mine had been bad, but hers? Well, he deserved a gold medal for shitty father of the year—hell, of the goddamn century.

As if I needed anything else to hate him for.

I took a step forward and lifted my hand to touch her face. When she didn’t step away, I pulled her face closer to me and stared deep in her eyes.

“Tell me what you want to tell me,” I whispered.

She took a deep breath and stepped away. “To tell you that, I’d need to get drunk.”

I grinned. “Then get drunk.”

***

And she did.

She was drunk as a skunk, as they would say in the South.

She was sitting in the chair at her kitchen table two hours later, her face twisted as she relayed yet another horrible scenario.

This one was when she was eighteen and she’d told her father that she was going with Krisney to college four hours away—out from under his thumb and his rules.

“He thought I was kidding at first,” she whispered, staring at her nearly empty bottle of wine. “Kind of laughed, then went on about his business as he prepared for a sermon. But then, at church the next day, everyone was congratulating him on me getting into UT, and it really hit home.” She paused. “That was the night that he hacked my hair off the last time before I left.”

I gritted my teeth in order not to say anything.

Each time I said something, she went off on a different topic on how her father abused her. Each time she spoke about him, it was even worse than the time before.

I was hanging on by a thread, and that thread was the tears that were threatening to fall each time she explained the next experience.

“Then I had all those blissful years without him,” she whispered. “Since I got the scholarship and school loans, I didn’t have to talk to him but for the occasional obligatory phone call that he deigned to make on Christmas and Thanksgiving.”

“Each year he got more and more angry because his congregation was asking about me and if I would be home that year, and when he said no, they’d get all sad for him.”

Fuck him. He deserved to be treated like that.

In reality, he deserved to have my foot up his ass, but with me being a felon, that probably wouldn’t go over really well with the local police department.

In this fucked up community that we had, everyone thought Pastor Hanes was a fucking sweetheart. He was an old widower.

“I think he cheated on my mother with someone,” she whispered. “My mom was dying of cancer, and she was so sick that she couldn’t get out of bed anymore.” She circled her finger around the rim of the wine glass. “I got home one night after staying at Krisney’s and found a woman leaving…”

She paused for so long that I knew what she was going to say next. “My mother?”

She bit her lip and looked at me. “Yes.”

I closed my eyes and looked down at my lap.

“Goddammit,” I rumbled. “I’m sorry, honey.”

I wasn’t surprised, though. My mother was my mother. There would be no apologies for how she acted. She did what she did and she didn’t care who she offended when she did it, even the teenage daughter of a dying woman that belonged to the man she was sleeping with.

She shrugged. “That was the first time I realized that my father wasn’t a very good man.”

I winced.

“I’m not like him,” she whispered so softly that I could barely hear her words.

“I know.”

She was nothing like him.

Then she lost the fight she was having with her tears, and the first one fell.

“I can’t be with you.”

I resisted the urge to go to her, to pull her into my arms and tell her everything would be okay.

Her father wasn’t going anywhere. Despite him being a bad person, and a shitty father to not one but two girls, he was free to spread his assholenness to everyone that he felt like it.

“I’m not Ariya’s daughter’s father,” I told her, knowing that if I didn’t tell her, that I could possibly lose the fight that I didn’t know I was having.

Her eyes widened, and another tear fell.

“Well, then who is?” she cried out.

I grimaced. “Your father.”

It took her a few seconds to realized—to really comprehend—what was going on, but when she did, she gasped in outrage.

“You’re shitting me!”

That was another thing about drunk Hennessy. She had the mouth of a pirate. It was as if all those words she didn’t allow herself to say when she was sober came out when she was drinking.

“No, I’m not joking,” I promised her. “I’m being a hundred and ten percent serious right now. Ariya didn’t want me to tell you, but considering I plan to make you mine, I didn’t want to start this off with a lie.”

Her mouth fell open. “You can’t make me yours. I’ve already transferred your patient care to someone else.”

I started to laugh. “I won’t be seeing your recommended psychologist, either.”

Her mouth twisted into an angry line. “You will be if I have to take you there myself!”

I started to chuckle. “I reached an agreement with the judge. My twenty hours has been fulfilled. I don’t have to do any more.”

Her mouth fell open. “How did you do that?”

“The judge wasn’t going to give it to me in the first place, but since it was recommended by the prison psychologist, and I wanted to make sure it was done right, I agreed to do it until it wasn’t needed anymore.”

She started to laugh. “That’s not something that a person gets to decide who’s been in prison. Why are you so special?”

“Because the cops, prison guards, judges, and my probation officer like me. Because I watched over their own quite a few times. Because I get what I want.”

“And what do you want?” she whispered, hope starting to fill her voice.

“You.”

She looked down at her glass of wine, then picked it up and downed the contents in one swallow.

“I can’t be with someone who thinks that I am worthless.”

That’s when I moved.

I pushed the dining room chair that she was in until only the back legs were holding it up. Her eyes were wide, and her face was frozen in surprise.

“I do not think you are worthless,” I growled.

“You said that I couldn’t do what you did in boot camp.”

I stared into her eyes. “Maybe not right now, no. But give it six weeks and you’d be able to, under the right training.”

She bit her lip.

“I also know for a fact that you’re smarter than me.”

She bit her lip.

“You’re beautiful, and smart,” I continued, my words hopefully penetrating whatever she was thinking. “I couldn’t ever do what you do. Couldn’t listen to what your patients have to tell you about every day.”

Her lip trembled.

“There’s nothing that you couldn’t do if you put your mind to it.”

“How do you know?” she challenged.

“Because you’re you,” I whispered. “Nobody that couldn’t handle it all could manage to get through eighteen years with your father.”

She closed her eyes. “I have a sister, and I didn’t even know it?”

And we were back to the important words that she’d conveniently not gone into much detail about.

“Yeah,” I said. “But at this point, I’m not sure that it would be best for her to meet you as her sister. I’m sure you could introduce yourself, say hi.”

She shook her head. “I think that Ariya might need me to stay away. Maybe if she were healthy, I’d pursue it, but from what I’ve heard, the little girl isn’t doing well.”

I shook my head. “They don’t expect her to make it much more than the next week.”

The words hurt to say.

I didn’t even know the girl and it hurt. Children were so fucking innocent. Their view on life wasn’t jaded like an adult’s view was.

“I’ll talk to Ariya,” I cleared my throat.

“She’ll be mad at you for telling me,” she countered.

I shrugged and let her chair thunk down onto all four legs.

Her face came to a stop next to my crotch.

Before I could step away, though, her arms threaded around my waist, and she buried her face into my belly.

“We’ll figure it out, baby.”

She breathed out. “I know.”

Her words were said into my belly, and I had to bite my lip to keep from bursting out laughing.

We stayed like that for long moments, her with her face buried in my stomach, and me sifting my hands through her hair.

In fact, that’d been all I intended to do was hold her, but she had different ideas.

“I think we need to forget,” she murmured. “Tomorrow we’ll pretend that this didn’t happen. That I don’t know what I know, and that my dad’s not an even bigger douche bag than I always knew he was. Today? Today, we’ll forget.”

I liked the way she thought, but one thing wasn’t going to happen.

“We’re not forgetting that this all would’ve been solved if your father wasn’t a douchebag,” I told her. “He’s ruined a lot of lives, and continues to try to ruin yours. We’re not forgetting that he’d do anything to make your life miserable.”

She breathed out, then stood up, her body so close to mine that we touched from chest to thighs.

“I know,” she admitted. “But it’s hard to think about. I mean, who the hell has relations with a woman the same age as their daughter, and then doesn’t follow up with that, even when they’re supposed to be a man of God?”

I had no answer to that, so I brought my mouth down on hers.

The kiss was short and sweet, but enough to convey what I was feeling for her.

“Get naked,” I ordered.

She laughed.

“I’m still mad at you,” she pushed herself away and walked around the chair, and then even further until she was on the other side of the table.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because yesterday at Bord’s you ignored me,” she said. “You saw me, I know you did.”

I snorted.

“It was either wave at you, or send Ariya into another round of questions that only has to do with you, or not piss her off.” I explained. “She thinks I’ve always had the hots for you.”

She didn’t need to know that Ariya was right.

“Have you?”

I paused, contemplating how much to tell her.

“I’ve always found you intriguing,” I finally settled on.

Her brows went up. “You’ve always ‘intrigued’ me, too.”

I chuckled and started to round the table.

She shuffled to keep the table in between her and me.

I paused, my head tilting to the side. “You don’t want me to touch you?”

She pursed her cute little lips. “I want to have my head about me. It seems when you get too close, I can’t remember what I should and shouldn’t be doing. Plus, your answer of ‘I’ve always found you intriguing’ isn’t good enough. I want the hard, dirty details.”

I snorted.

And before she could do much more than squeak, I vaulted over the table and snatched her up in my arms.

She gasped and froze as I pressed my hard length against her hip.

“You want to know that I’m a dirty boy and had the hots for a girl that was way too fucking young for me?” I questioned.

She bit her lip and nodded.

“Fine,” I said. “I wanted to fuck you from the time you grew those breasts. I made myself join the military so I’d forget about you.”

“Did it work?” she whispered.

I nodded. “It did. Without you under my nose around every turn, I was able to focus on other things. The minute I got back, all bets were off.”

Her brows rose as she tried to squirm out of my hold.

“Let me go, you big galoot.” She squirmed harder.

I held her so tightly against me that all that she was doing was moving against the length of my cock, making me want to rip the jeans straight off her legs and throw them out the fucking window.

I grunted when one particular wiggle had her breaking free of my hold.

Though, she wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t afraid that she was going to hurt herself by twisting so hard that I had no choice but to let her go or hurt her by holding on.

She took the newfound freedom and dashed out of the room.

I followed her much slower, coming to a stop outside of her room and pausing to lean up against the doorframe.

She was folding laundry of all things.

“You’re telling me you’d rather do chores?” I asked incredulously.

“You really did piss me off today,” she added as she tucked a towel underneath her chin, pinched it between her chin and her chest, and then proceeded to fold it.

“I know,” I said. “If it makes you feel better, I pissed myself off, too.”

She shook her head. “No, not really.”

My eyes watched her every movement. The way she easily folded clothes into perfectly pressed presentation. Something that would’ve literally taken me five minutes and a freakin’ headache to accomplish.

Then she started in on a sheet, and I moved in to help her, taking the edges from her without a word. The minute the sheet was finished, I took it from her and laid it on the bed next to her other clothes, then stared in fascination as she finished it up by doing the impossible—folding a fitted sheet.

Hell, by the time she was done with it, I was convinced she wasn’t human.

It looked like she’d taken it straight out of the package that she’d bought it in.

“That’s impressive as hell,” I finally told her, eying the fitted sheet like it was an alien from outer space.

Seriously, I could only fold it in half, and then in half again before I decided that it’d never be perfect. Then I followed it up by rolling it up into a ball and shoving it onto the shelf with the other items that seemed to accumulate when you had a house.

“I learned it from my suite mate in college,” she said. “Mine used to be big blobs, but one day she walked in while I was ‘folding’ my fitted sheet, showed me how it was done, and I’ve never done it the old way since.”

Once she freed up the chair of the laundry, all the folded clothes now on the end of the bed, my eyes landed on a t-shirt.

One that was one I’d been looking for this morning, but hadn’t been able to find.

“Seems like you have some klepto in you,” I told her, nodding my head in the direction of the shirt.

She blushed.

“I…” She paused. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Of course she didn’t.

I took a seat in the chair and stared at her as she tried to make herself busy by putting up the clothes.

The t-shirt she tried to hand back, but I just shook my head. “Keep it.”

She bit her lip, then walked to the bed and very carefully laid it on her pillow before turning to me.

“I’ve got a little bit of a problem when it comes to men,” she said suddenly. “I know that you probably wouldn’t do anything that I accused you of today, but I can’t just turn off that part of my brain.”

I leaned forward and let my arms rest on my elbows. “Your father damaged something inside of you, and it’s going to take more than me saying that I wouldn’t do something like that to you to fix it. It’s going to take courage on your part, but if you’re willing to give what we have here a try, then I am, too.”

Her eyes went wide.

“What if I wanted to be exclusive?” she tested.

“What if I wanted to have you and no one else?”

She growled. “What if you decide that this is too much and leave when I’m head over heels in love with you with no way to breathe without you?”

I crossed my arms. “What makes you think that I’m not in the exact same position?”

She gritted her teeth.

“I know next to nothing about you,” she blurted.

“I’m an open book,” I said. “I have no secrets.”

Now she was just bringing shit up to throw at me because she was scared.

My belly was rolling, and I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to talk her out of not wanting anything to do with me.

I wasn’t the best catch on Earth, but I knew one thing for certain.

The woman standing there, the woman that stole my shirt…she was the one. She was it for me. There was no one else that would ever be good enough, and I’d always known it.