Chapter 6

Sometimes I want to rub Sterling’s beard like my lucky rabbit’s foot.

-Ruthie’s secret thoughts

Sterling

“This isn’t safe at all,” I muttered to myself as I took in the darkened gas station.

I’d seen it in passing at night, but never really connected it with Ruthie working.

There wasn’t a single light on in the parking lot, and once you turned the light on inside, you were highlighted perfectly while you couldn’t make out a single goddamn thing outside.

And my SEAL training was screaming at me to get the fuck out of such a high profile spot.

“Would you chill out? You’re scaring away the customers,” Ruthie admonished as she started flicking on all of the coffee makers.

I looked back at the parking lot that had yet to see a single customer.

“There haven’t been any here at all. How would I have scared them away?” I asked, confused.

Ruthie tossed a smile over her shoulder. “I was teasing. Something that obviously went right over your head. Hey, will you do me a favor and bring me a bucket of ice out of the back?”

She pointed in the direction of a doorway, one I remembered looking into earlier when we’d first arrived.

All that was in it was an ice machine and some extra supplies such as coffee cups, napkins, and straws.

I went and did what she asked, hearing the door jingle not even thirty seconds after I started filling up the bucket.

I came out with my hand grasped around the metal handle to see Ruthie flirting away with an older man that looked to be in his mid-nineties.

Was he even able to drive a car anymore? He could barely walk.

But he could talk.

“Ruthie, you didn’t get me a cup yet, did’ja darlin’?” The old man asked.

Ruthie smiled at him. “No, Mr. Adams. I just got here myself. My man decided to make me late.”

I felt my chest expand as she called me her ‘man.’

I’d never really had anyone in my life call me their own and it felt really good to hear someone be possessive of me.

“Oh, did he get cheeky with you to make you late?” Mr. Adams asked teasingly, walking stiffly over to the metal counter where all the drinks were being held.

He pulled the half done coffee pot out of its holder and held his shaking hand underneath the flow of coffee still pouring out of the pot.

Once he had it filled, he replaced the pot with surprising agility and placed the paper cup onto the counter where he proceeded to fill it up with so much sugar that I was fairly sure it could be nothing but sludge at the bottom.

“He just complains a lot about my safety,” Ruthie said, turning a wink on me before she went over to Mr. Adams and put a lid on his coffee cup. “Seems SEALS are overly cautious.”

It was almost as if she’d done it so many times that it was a sort of routine for them.

“Being safe isn’t a bad thing. When I was in the war, I came home doing a lot of things differently. Like I used to check my locks five times a night. God forbid I hear a creak I couldn’t explain, which meant I was doing the lock thing again. My guns were always at the ready, too. My wife, bless her sweet heart, hated it. But she loved me and lived with it, which is what I assume you’re doing by that smile on your face,” Mr. Adams said.

Her eyes locked with mine, startled.

I couldn’t say that it was fear in her eyes, per se, but it was something.

Hope? Nervousness?

Maybe them all.

I didn’t know.

What I did know was that what I felt for Ruthie went beyond just the physical.

While I’d been pinned down in Iran, I’d had a lot of time do some much needed thinking.

Thinking about my life.

How I wanted things to go for me. Who I wanted in my life. What I wanted to do for the rest of it.

But I had to survive first.

And there were times in the last nine weeks where I wasn’t sure I was going to.

But Ruthie had been at the front of my mind through it all. It’d been her face I’d seen when I’d nearly lost my life when I was hightailing it out of a dark alley, a barrage of gunfire following the team out.

We’d been ambushed.

Soldiers were at the ready the moment we’d stepped foot onto the street at that flea bitten motel.

We’d never even seen the pregnant ex-wife, nor the man who’d brought her to that cesspool sandbox of a country.

“You gonna bring that ice over here or do I need to do it myself, son?”

My eyes snapped back from where the blank stare I’d been giving the sign above the coke machine.

“Yeah, I’ll get it,” I said, bringing the bucket to the machine and pouring it in the hole at the top of the machine where Ruthie indicated.

“It’s more fun to watch her climb up on the ladder and do that herself,” Mr. Adams said.

I tossed him a grin.

“She does have a fine ass,” I agreed.

Ruthie gasped.

He winked, but his face smoothed to somber as he turned to Ruthie.

“I say, you should really control this man,” Mr. Adams said as he started shuffling to the front door. “I’ll pay you tomorrow. I forgot my wallet in the truck, and it’d take me longer to go out there and get it than I want. I don’t move like I once did. And the fish are gonna be biting soon if I don’t hurry.”

With that he slipped out into the still predawn air, leaving the jingling of the door in his wake.

“He was nice,” I said, taking the bucket back into the storage room.

“Will you grab me a box of straws off the top shelf?” She yelled.

I grabbed the box and started back outside, but stilled when I saw the man coming into the store.

He looked shady as fuck.

Long shaggy hair. Wild eyes.

Dirty grunge covered jeans, tennis shoes that looked like they should’ve been retired long ago. And the shirt was so covered in filth that I wanted to cringe.

When was the last time the man took a bath?

Or washed his clothes?

Not waiting to see what he wanted, I walked back out, placing the box on the counter next to Ruthie who still had her back to the customer as she straightened up the straws and cups in the dispenser in front of her.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

He jerked, surprised that I’d actually spoken to him.

“Yeah,” he said licking his lips. “You got a dollar you can spare?”

I reached into my back pocket, withdrew my wallet, and fished a dollar out of it and folded it in two before handing it to him.

Although I knew what he was going to do before I even saw him move, I still gave him the benefit of the doubt.

He reached forward and tried to snatch the entire wallet out of my hand, but I snapped my arm back and placed myself in front of Ruthie before aiming the gun that suddenly appeared in my hand pointed at the man’s face.

He froze.

“Don’t,” he whispered.

“Give me a reason,” I growled.

Ruthie slowly turned, but stayed plastered to my back, not even peeking her head over my shoulder to get a look.

Good girl.

I could feel her softness sinking into me, and I hated that she was there right then.

What would’ve happened had I not been there?

“I need it, man. I just need it,” he chattered, arm rising to scratch at his neck viciously.

I shook my head. “Go to the hospital. Get yourself cleaned up.”

He shook his head. “I can’t. They said I had to bring them money or they’d kill her.”

“Her who?” I asked sharply, startling the man.

“My dog,” he explained like it was completely rational that whoever it was would threaten his dog if he didn’t pay the money he owed.

And genuinely it would’ve worked with some people.

I wasn’t some people, though.

I was me.

I couldn’t say I’d been in his exact same position before, but I knew what desperation felt like.

Yet here I was, making something of myself.

The man standing in front of me probably had some of the same possibilities that I had, yet he’d chosen a different path in life.

“Get out of here,” I barked, holstering my gun.

He ran, not looking back, and I felt Ruthie finally settle at my back.

“Shit,” she whispered. “He’s never done that before.”

I blinked and moved until I could look out the doors.

It was finally lightening up outside, which meant I could see that the man had run.

He was no longer in the parking lot, but what she’d just said didn’t make my heart rate decrease any.

“He’s never done that before?” I asked for clarification.

She shook her head. “Normally, I just give him the dollar and he leaves.”

I gritted my teeth and walked closer to her. “Does your boss know this man?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s the one who opens when I’m not, so I only assume he does.”

“And the sight of that man never raised any red flags with you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “He’s just down on his luck.”

“Really down on his luck,” I muttered to myself, pulling my phone out of my pocket.

“What are you doing?” She asked in surprise.

“Calling the police. They need to know what happened, that way if it ever happens again a report is on file for it,” I told her.

She rolled her eyes. “I already said he’s harmless.”

“I don’t care if he’s ‘harmless’ as you say he is. Just make sure you always keep your distance from him, and stop being so trusting. Everyone has a past, and I saw the violence in his eyes. He was desperate today, what do you think will happen if three days pass and he still doesn’t have what he wants?” I asked her.

She pursed her lips. “I don’t know.”

I studied her face for a long moment before I said, “He’ll come back. He knows you’ll give him money, next time he’ll be smarter about who he comes in here with, too.”

She nodded. “I’ll be careful. Dane said something about allowing us to carry a shotgun under the counter. Maybe it’d be a good thing to start that.”

I gave her a raised brow. “Do you know how to shoot a shotgun?”

She shook her head. “No. But don’t you just point and shoot?”

I shook my head.

I mean really, was the owner just going to say, ‘Here’s a gun. Shoot anyone that you feel needs to be shot?’

“Before you tell him that, I’ll take you out to the range and teach you. When do you open next?” I asked.

She closed her eyes and tilted her head slightly. “I’m not allowed to own a gun.”

I stopped to think about that for a moment.

Of course she wouldn’t be able to.

“Are…do you mind telling me…how you killed him?” I asked, leaning my ass against the counter.

It’d been weighing on my mind.

Not the fact that she’d killed him, but the fact that she’d had to kill him.

What had happened that she needed to resort to those kinds of measures?

All I’d been able to gather from Silas was that she’d been abused and scared for her life.

I had no details on the rest.

She looked down at her hands where they were buried in the box full of straws, and closed her eyes like she’d wanted to do anything but explain.

But she did, and I was never more proud of her than I was at that moment.

“I met Bender when I was in college. He had gone to the same high school as Lily and I and we had unknowingly followed him to Louisiana. I hadn’t ever really noticed him until college, though. I had a crush on him from the moment I saw him, but his eyes were all for Lily, my best friend,” she told me. “But when he saw that Lily had the hots for Dante, his best friend, he slept with me to try to make her jealous. Me, being the naïve girl that I was, had no clue that’d been why he’d done it. I was only happy to be noticed. So we got together that night, and weeks later with nothing from him, I found out I was pregnant.”

She smashed the straws into the holder and turned around, thrusting her fingers into her hair.

“I told him what happened, and he acted like I was a piece of lint to be picked off his shirt. Gave me a ‘that sucks’ and went on about his business. But my pregnancy had been difficult, and bills started piling up.” She shook her head. “I don’t really know how it happened, but his parents somehow found out, and forced him to marry me. Something else I didn’t know at the time.” Her head hung. “I was so happy not to be alone through that, that I jumped at the chance.”

She started, lurched forward and folded the box closed, needing something to do with her hands as she said, “We married, but he was abusive. Resented everything about me that he could. At first it was all just verbal attacks, but they slowly morphed into physical attacks when I was five months pregnant. It was bad. He was six foot five inches and over three hundred pounds. Was a star athlete at ULM. Played in three sports. And he was so muscular.” She rested both hands on the top of the box, and I finally couldn’t take it anymore.

I moved forward and gathered her into my arms.

“Yeah?” I asked.

She felt tiny in my arms.

I wasn’t that big, only six foot three, and two hundred and thirty pounds, but the sound of the man she’d once been wed to sounded massive.

He’d dwarf her five foot two inch frame.

And imagining hitting this woman with any force whatsoever made rage pour into my gut.

My mind drifted back to memories of my mother with each man she used to pick up on any given day.

Though a few of them weren’t what I would call ‘abusive,’ the vast majority of them were.

Seriously.

Although if there was one thing I could say about my mother, she always protected me.

Even when she gave me up for adoption at thirteen, she was protecting me.

Which had made the entire thing hurt even worse, knowing that she hadn’t wanted to give me up.

But she’d fallen in with a bad crowd, and couldn’t see a way out.

So she’d had a friend drop me off at a fire station.

I’d been coached for hours on what to say and not to say to the authorities.

It helped that I looked a lot younger than I actually was.

So I was put into the foster system, and haven’t seen my mother since that day fourteen years before.

Not that I hadn’t tried to look for her.

I’d looked a lot.

It was just that wherever she was at, she had protection now.

The little bit I’d gathered on her whereabouts indicated protection and not danger.

So I’d let her be, even though it broke my heart to do so.

“When I was around eight months pregnant, Bender beat me so badly that I couldn’t not go to the hospital. I had to make sure my baby was all right. And when I got there, they told me that my baby had suffered multiple traumas and was no longer alive,” she choked.

I snapped back out of my own head with a jarring yank, and I was just as mad now as I’d been earlier.

Child abuse was a hard limit for me.

I’d grown up protected from it until I’d gotten into the foster home with Cormac and Garrison, and there our supposed ‘foster parents’ took turns beating the shit out of us if we didn’t get our housework done on time.

Something that happened quite often seeing as they expected so much of us.

But right then, my focus was all on Ruthie and the tears that she was soaking into my shirt.

“I pressed charges on him. For the first time in seven months, I finally pressed charges…when it no longer counted,” she whispered brokenly.

Her sobs were tearing through my armor that I used to surround my heart.

To hold me back from this very sort of thing.

If you felt, you hurt.

There was no way around it.

If you cared, and trust me, it was something that I tried valiantly not to do, you always end up hurt.

“You weren’t too late,” I told her. “And the charges did count.”

She shook her head.

“He was arrested, and in jail for only an hour. An hour, Sterling,” she rasped. “And I knew, the moment he came up on the man that was changing our locks that he wasn’t going to stop. He didn’t care. He felt like I was the reason for his bad luck. That I was the reason he didn’t get Lily like he wanted.”

I held her tighter, knowing where this was going before the words even left her lips.

“He slapped me in passing, knocking me down and then went into the bathroom. So I went into the bedroom that we shared. Where I slept next to him night after night, scared as hell but knowing he’d accept nothing less from me, and picked up the gun he liked to wave in my face when he was feeling particularly feisty,” she choked. “And the moment he started to pee, I shot him. In the heart. Because I knew if I didn’t, he’d kill me.”

I ran my beard along her face, trying to help the emotions I knew were barreling away inside her.

“I don’t think I would have done a damn thing differently,” I whispered. “Not a single damn thing.”

Hell, I was in an abusive situation for some of the most pivotal years of my life.

I got away from it the moment I could safely do so.

I could’ve told somebody.

But I didn’t.

Why?

I couldn’t really tell you.

When you’re in a situation like that, you don’t see things the same as you do once you’re free and clear of it.

You see them with these glasses on.

It’s like you’re aware that what’s going on is bad, but you don’t think you can get away.

And in Ruthie’s situation, she knew that once she reported what was going on to the authorities, something would happen to her.

So she’d taken precautions.

Not everyone reaches that point.

I never reached that point.

But Ruthie lost something that I’d never had.

A child that she’d loved with all of her heart.

And who wouldn’t react the way Ruthie had?

“What are you doing to my employee?” A man barked.

I looked up to see the owner of the place there, staring at Ruthie in horror looking like he was about to do violence against me on her behalf.

“Dane, this is Sterling. You know him,” she said in exasperation.

Dane’s eyes narrowed.

“Is this the boy that you kept making me watch the news for?” He grumbled crossing his beefy arms over his chest.

She nodded, biting her lip and glaring quickly at me before turning back to Dane.

“Yeah, this is him. He’s okay, though,” she told Dane.

“I can see that. Very healthy…” he said, looking pointedly at my crotch.

I laughed.

Ruthie, however, missed the whole interaction.

“So I’m guessing you want the day off,” he grumbled, starting forward.

Ruthie shook her head. “Not really, no. I was just hoping you wouldn’t mind that he’s here with me. I need the money.”

“You have vacation, you know,” Dane informed her, taking a seat on the stool behind the counter.

Ruthie nodded. “Yeah, but I’m saving that up for something important.”

His brows rose. “What you got to do that’s important that you need a whole fourteen days for?”

She pursed her lips. “I don’t know. But something might come up.”

I could figure out something to do with fourteen days.

And it involved lots and lots of cardio.

“Take your man and get out of here. Have breakfast. Be here tomorrow at nine. I got you for today,” he said, standing up and offering his hand to me. “Glad you made it home, son. You would’ve had one upset girl on your hands had anything bad happened to you.”

I looked down at Ruthie’s averted eyes, and realized that I did, in fact, have something good on my hands.

Something I planned to take care of indefinitely.

Whether she wanted me to or not.