Sadie woke with a start. It took her several terrifying seconds to process why she was lying in bed with a man. Once she remembered it was Marcus, she had to process why her head was throbbing and her body felt like she’d been run over by a truck.
Oh. Right. She was assaulted…maybe by Brendan. That was hard to believe. Two long years she hadn’t heard a single word from him. He didn’t ask for his furniture, the rest of his clothes, or even the money they had in a joint account. It just didn’t make sense that he’d slink around two years later and hit her upside the head with a bat.
She wanted to get up and take something for her head. It was killing her. But Marcus had his long, thick arms and legs wrapped around her and if she hadn’t been in pain, she could have lived like that forever. She gazed at him through the dim light from the window. His mouth was open a little and his long eyelashes were fluttering and his messy hair was in his eyes. She hadn’t noticed the night before, but he’d trimmed his beard. She wished sometimes that he would shave it off. He was so beautiful. She sometimes ached to see his face without all of that dark hair covering it. She reached up and touched his cheek, which was now covered in a five o’clock shadow. It was so soft. She would have imagined it to be coarse and scratchy, but when he kissed her the night before she’d realized how wrong she was. She wanted to kiss him again. But first…she had to have a Tylenol.
Sadie wiggled slowly out of Marcus’s grasp but the second she rolled toward the edge of the bed he was wide awake and sitting up in the bed.
“What? What’s wrong?” He looked around, eyes slightly wild, his hair falling over them.
She turned to look at him and a lightning bolt of pain shot through her head. She winced. “Oh, shit. You’re in pain. We should have had those pain meds filled before we left San Antonio.”
“It’s okay, really. The Tylenol helped a lot last night. I’ll just take some more of that.”
Marcus slung his long legs off the bed. “Stay here, I’ll get it.”
“I’m okay to get it…”
“Stay here.” She watched him get up and leave the room. He was still fully dressed, all except for his shoes. The poor thing couldn’t be very comfortable. He was back in two minutes with the entire bottle of Tylenol and a bottle of cold water.
“Thank you.” She tapped out three into her hand and washed them down with a long, cool drink of water. She looked at the numbers on the LED alarm clock then. It was four fifteen a.m. They’d only been asleep a little over two hours and she hadn’t realized the only light came from the moon and streetlights outside. “Jeez, I’m sorry I woke you up. You must be exhausted.”
Marcus sat back down on the bed. “I’m fine, really. I’m glad I heard you trying to sneak out. I’m here to help you.”
“You’re helping,” she said with a smile. “Thank you for staying with me.”
“My pleasure,” he said. “Do you want me to go sleep in the other room now so you can stretch out?”
“No, but take off your shirt and pants.”
He cocked an eyebrow and with a sexy smile playing at the corners of his lips he said, “Why, Sadie, are you trying to seduce me right now?”
She giggled and then delighted in the look on his face when she playfully said, “Honey, if I wasn’t in pain I would have skipped the seduction and gone straight for the main course.”
He let out a strangled laugh, cleared his throat, made another weird sound, and then finally stood up and pulled off his shirt. She could see all those defined muscles she’d been dreaming about in the light of the moon streaming in through the window. His torso looked like it had been sculpted out of solid granite and then just the top of it was dipped in colorful ink. Across the front of his chest was an eagle with vividly colored wings. It held arrows in one of his talons and olive branches in the other. Each shoulder had colorful designs and the top of his right bicep held a gorgeous tribal band.
He unzipped his jeans and pushed them down, and as he stepped out of them the muscles in his thighs rippled. Sadie was suddenly afraid that she wasn’t in quite enough pain. She’d have to be knocking at death’s door to not want him, and the fact that he seemed to have no clue what he looked like was more confusing to her than ever. He started to lie back down on top of the covers but Sadie lifted them up and moved over. He cleared his throat again, which made her smile, and then climbed in next to her. She didn’t wait for him to make a move, afraid that he wouldn’t. She moved over so that she was right up against his bare chest and buried her face in it. He was so warm and he smelled so good…so masculine. It had been a long time since she’d been this close to a man…too long. The fact that it was Marcus only made it that much more thrilling. He had one arm underneath her and he was using the other hand to caress her hair and the side of her face. She felt like purring. She reluctantly pulled her face away from his chest so that she could look up at his handsome face. He had that look in his eyes that he always got when he looked at her, but it was intensified by a thousand. She was going to ask him to kiss her, but he had the idea all on his own. He brought his mouth down to hers and caressed her lips with his. It was hot the way he just let them softly press into and massage hers. His hands were moving while he did that, one slowly down her back and the other tracing a path down her arm, leaving goosebumps in its wake. When he slipped his warm tongue into her mouth it was like getting to eat the icing on the cake and it was delicious. He wasn’t in a hurry. He was there to explore, to taste each and every surface and to dance with her tongue. His kisses were like magic and Sadie could swear that she felt her soul burning.
“Shit,” he muttered against her mouth. “Need to stop.”
“No. No stopping.”
He did it anyways. He pulled back and looked at her face. “Even in the dark I can see how tired you are. You’re all beat up. You’re in pain. I can wait, Sadie. I can wait forever if that’s what it takes. You need to rest.”
“Why?” She could feel how badly he wanted her. She saw it in his eyes on a daily basis, but tonight, she could feel it in a physical sense. She’d never had a relationship with a man who would be willing to wait forever.
He was looking down at her face like she was the most beautiful thing on earth, and when he spoke, he made her feel like she was. “Because you’re worth it. Because I’ve already waited all of these years and my feelings for you haven’t changed…they’ve only gotten stronger. You know me. I’m not good at this. Words are not my thing, especially when it comes to talking about how I feel…”
She stopped him with another kiss. He said that he wasn’t good with words and then he slayed her with them. He was the one to break the kiss again.
“You need to get some rest,” he said again, though regretfully.
Sadie groaned into his chest. She knew he was right, but God, it was so hard. She’d waited for him for so long….
********
By the time she woke up again, Marcus was gone and his side of the bed was cold. The sun was shining brightly through the window and she was shocked when she rolled over and saw that it was already eight forty-five. They were supposed to be at Cade’s by nine. She threw back the covers and started to jump out of bed but the pain and nausea both hit her at once like a ton of bricks and she had to sit back down. She was working through the waves of it when Marcus came into the room carrying a tall glass of something green in one hand and prescription bottles in the other.
“Good morning. How are you feeling?”
She couldn’t stop looking at the green, slightly frothy liquid. Surely he didn’t expect her to drink it. “I’m okay,” she said, trying not to show her discomfort. “But we’re late.”
“Nah, it’s okay. You know Cade doesn’t run on any kind of tight schedule. I told him we’d try and make it by ten. I picked up your prescriptions.”
She blinked at him, surprised. “Thank you. You didn’t have to do that.”
“It wasn’t a problem. Here, I made you a protein drink.” He held out the glass to her.
She looked at the green stuff again and her face must have given her away because Marcus laughed. “It’s really not as bad as it looks, but you don’t have to drink it if you don’t want to,” he said, smiling.
“I’ll give it a shot,” she said. He went through all the trouble, after all. She only hoped that she could keep it down.
Still laughing he handed it to her and said, “You have the exact same look on your face that Peter Dailey had the first day I made one for him.”
“Did he grow to like them?”
“Nope. He still hates them.”
She laughed and took a hesitant sip. He was right. It wasn’t that bad. Marcus opened the pill bottles and gave her one of each, an antibiotic and a pain reliever. Then he sat down next to her on the bed and said, “I have some news…about Brendan Michaels.”
She stopped drinking the green concoction and sat it down on the nightstand. “What is it?”
“Cade said he was arrested in San Antonio the day he left Blossom Hill. He got into a bar fight and seriously injured some guy. He couldn’t make bail, sat in jail for six months until his trial, and was sentenced to three years. He got out last week.”
“Shit. I guess that explains why it took him two years to show up.”
“Yeah. He hasn’t checked in with his P.O. since he was released. He just disappeared. What else can you tell me about him, Sadie?”
Sadie felt herself begin to shake. Towards the end, she didn’t like Brendan much at all, but she’d never been afraid of him. But it was terrifying to think that she lived with a man for two years and never had a clue what he was capable of. What if he hadn’t gone to jail that day? What would he have done to her? Would she even be sitting here today?
“I met him in San Antonio one night when I went out with Laura. I was lonely and he was attentive and sweet. He asked me out and we started dating. He’d drive all the way to Blossom Hill to see me at the bar on the nights I was working. Later, when things started going badly I realized I’d ignored a lot of signs that things weren’t right. He drank way too much, for one. He missed work a lot because he was either drunk or hungover. In the two years I knew him he changed jobs three times. I also didn’t realize for a long time that the reason he came to the bar when I was working wasn’t because he missed me, but because he wanted to make sure I wasn’t talking to anyone or doing anything I wasn’t supposed to be. At least in his eyes. It was after he moved here and moved in with me that he would start grilling me about who a certain man was that talked to me and how well I knew him. He would sit in that bar and watch and act like a good old boy and then come home and call me names and accuse me of things. I should have ended it a lot sooner than I did, but when he was sober he’d apologize and be sweet again. I know this is typical, but I thought he would change. He never raised a hand to me, never hurt me physically. I wouldn’t have stood for that.” She paused, took a deep breath, and said, “I knew that he heard the stories about you and the night of prom. He spent a lot of time drinking with Bubba, so I knew he told him. But Brendan never asked me about it. Then one Saturday morning while I was out working in the yard, he decided to go through my things. He found our prom picture in my dresser drawer in an envelope where I kept it. He was sitting at the kitchen table when I came in to fix lunch with a half drank bottle of whiskey in front of him. He threw the picture at me and wanted to know why I kept it.” She paused again, this time so long that Marcus spoke up.
“What did you tell him, Sadie?” He wanted to ask why she kept their picture in the dresser drawer. He would have thought she wouldn’t want to see it.
“The truth. I told him that I kept the picture for sentimental reasons. He asked me if I was in love with you. I told him that as much as a teenager could be in love, I guess I was back then. That wasn’t the ‘right’ answer as far as he was concerned. He became verbally abusive. He told me I was a fool and the laughing stock of this town. He wanted to know if I had sex with you and when I told him no, he didn’t believe me. He said terrible things about your race and the fact that you lived up in the mountains. I guess Bubba had pointed out your dad one day when they came down to town and he even had some awful things to say about him. I got angry and told him he had no right to talk about you or your family that way and he had no right to go through my things. I walked out, but he followed me.”
“You went in the store to get away from him?”
She nodded. “Yes, like I said, he’d never hurt me before, but that day he was so angry that I was afraid that he was going to. He kept insisting I get in the car with him and I didn’t want to. I started running and the grocery store was the first place I went to. Mason was on the phone when I went in so I just went to the back, thinking I’d hang out and lay low and Brendan would give up and go home to sober up. But I guess he saw me go into the store and he came in after me. I told him to leave me alone and I even told him I’d call the sheriff and tell them he was driving around drunk. I said some things to him about you that I guess I shouldn’t have, and that’s when he snapped and threw the jar at my head. You know the rest.”
“What did you say about me?” Marcus was curious, but when he saw the uncomfortable look on her face he quickly said, “Never mind, I’m sorry. That doesn’t matter. I was just being nosy.”
Sadie smiled. “I just told him the truth again. I told him that even as a boy you had more class in your little finger than he had in his entire body and the last time I saw you at eighteen, you were more of a man than he would probably ever be. I was upset and he was saying ugly things to me. I shouldn’t have been taunting him, but I meant every word.”
Marcus set the prescription bottles down on the bed and took Sadie’s hands in his. “I’m sorry you had to go through all of that. I’m so sorry I left you out there by yourself the other night. I promise you that I’m going to find this guy and he’s never going to hurt you again. I love you, Sadie. I don’t know if we can ever be together the way I want, but I’ve held that in for way too long. Anything can happen and when I die I want to take my last breath knowing that you know that.”