Chapter 10

I love when I’m with you, and I don’t have to pretend I’m nice.

-Lark to Baylor

Lark

I glared at Harold.

“Listen,” I said, trying to keep calm. “I can’t afford to pay this ticket. If you give it to me, it’s not getting paid.”

Harold continued to write.

“I realize that you think you’re helping the neighborhood.” LIES! “But, everyone is getting to the point where they feel like it’s too much.”

“I can’t have you parking in the street.” He handed me the ticket.

I didn’t take it.

Instead, I looked at him like the piece of slime he was.

How could Sam, the man who had originally planned for me to come here, not know what a piece of shit he had for a contact here?

Seriously, I didn’t think he knew. There was no way if he did know, that he would allow this to happen.

“I’m sorry.” He walked to the car and slipped it underneath the windshield wiper when I wouldn’t take it. “But there are rules, and I can’t have you breaking the rules. Then everyone’s going to think that they can break the rules.”

I just shook my head. “Harold, it’s not my car.”

Harold didn’t seem to care, however. All he cared about was that there was a car in front of my house that was taking up too much of the road. Oh, and let’s not forget that I’d forgotten to register the car with him so he knows which cars belong, and which cars don’t belong.

“I don’t believe you,” he said. “You’ve had two cars in the last month. How am I supposed to believe you?”

I looked at him steadily. “If it was my car, wouldn’t you think that I’d be parking it in the driveway?”

I pointed to the empty driveway behind me, and I would’ve continued to speak had a truck not pulled in moments after I said that.

We both watched as the man in the truck—Baylor—got out and stood up to his full height. He took us both in, shook his head, and started forward.

“What’s going on?” he asked, his eyes moving from me to Harold and back again.

I ground my teeth together.

“Harold gave me a ticket for someone else’s car being too far off the curb.” I pointed to said car.

Baylor’s eyes went to the car, then to the other cars that were lining the road. Which happened to be centered around his brother’s house.

“That’s Hail House and Hail Auto Recovery Employees,” he said. “We had a ball game up at the top of the road, and we met at Travis’ house and walked—well, they did. I didn’t. But these are all their cars. This one right here is Evander Lennox’s wife’s car.”

Harold bared his teeth. “Well, then I’ll go ticket your brother instead.”

He ripped the ticket off the window, tore it in half, and dropped it to the ground.

I looked at the two pieces of paper as they floated to the ground, and then incredulously looked back up at Harold.

“So, who writes you tickets when you are the one to break the rules?” I snapped, all of a sudden so angry that I couldn’t find the common sense to shut the hell up.

Harold turned, his eyes narrowing.

“I wouldn’t be so quick to judge, Miss Lawrence.”

I clenched my hands into fists.

The emphasis on my last name—which he was well aware wasn’t really my last name—was enough to put me in my place.

I couldn’t fuck this up. Harold might be bad—no awful—but he wasn’t anywhere near as bad as my ex was.

At least here, though angered, I would live.

If my ex ever found me…that wouldn’t just be terrible, it’d be detrimental to my safety and well-being.

My eyes went distant as the memories started to assault me one by one.

The day I met Sal. How my life had changed in a matter of moments.

How I’d thought I’d won the lottery when I married Sal, a fine, and upstanding police officer.

Him being a police officer should’ve been a good thing.

It wasn’t.

He acted like he was a god. Like he could do anything just because he wore a badge.

Fast forward five years, and I was at the lowest of my lows.

I’d cut myself off from the rest of my family. I was pregnant again, scared, and alone as I tried to run away from a man who found it fun to beat the shit out of me just because he could.

I didn’t make it. It’d been my fifth failed attempt.

The moment he got me inside our home, he beat me.

The last day I’d felt any semblance of my old self, I’d had another miscarriage.

That’d been the last straw.

I wasn’t playing around anymore.

It didn’t matter if I died. What was the point anymore?

I had no one. My family was all sickened by the sight of me—totally my fault. My friends thought I was a joke—again, my fault. My business associates hated me because I always called out sick, mostly because I’d been beaten so badly that I couldn’t stand up—yep, still my fault.

It took me almost another six months to concoct the perfect plan to get away from Sal. Then three more months after that to put the plan into place.

It was at the fourth women’s shelter I’d been to in less than forty-eight hours that I found Sam’s card. Well, it hadn’t been Sam’s card, but his organization’s card. It had been handed to me by some random nun who told me that my trouble wasn’t the kind of trouble that they could handle. And if I wanted to not only save my life but the lives of the other women in the shelter, then I needed to call the number on the card.

I’d called the number.

Less than eight hours later, I had found myself standing in the middle of Nowhere, Texas, staring at a man who told me he would help me.

There’d been no catch, no promises were made on my part. Just a couple of really good-looking men, and two young women, taking the burden off my shoulders.

“Lark!”

It wasn’t the name that brought me out of my contemplation, but the worried cadence of Baylor’s voice.

“What?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

He looked at me worriedly.

“Are you okay?”

I tilted my head to the side in confusion. “What are you talking about? I’m perfectly fine.”

I started to look around, noticing that Harold was nearly back to his own place.

I breathed a sigh of relief. I was fine. Okay. Great.

At least on the outside.

But on the inside, I was a jumbled mess of nerves that was still unable to believe that this new life I was in was real.

I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“…poppy...”

My entire being froze.

My breaths stalled in my lungs. My hands fisted at my side. My feet shifted to take flight. My heart started to slam in my chest.

I was shivering, a fine sheen of sweat had dusted my face and chest, and there was a roaring in my ears.

Poppy seed bagels. Goddamn those things.

“Do you like poppy seed bagels?” he asked, holding up a brown paper bag. “I got some at the store.”

I managed to shake my head. “No, I don’t like p-p-poppy seed bagels.”

Lies.

I loved them.

Turns out, Sal doesn’t. How did I find that out? When he tried to punch me in the throat when he caught me eating one. He’d missed my throat. My jaw hadn’t been so lucky.

He shrugged. “I have some cheddar asiago ones, too.”

He handed me the bag, and my arm automatically lifted to take it.

I looked from him to the bag, wondering if he saw my minor freak out moments ago, but he didn’t show any indication that he had noticed.

So, I chose to ignore it and walk into my house.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

I skirted the bike, keeping my eyes on my feet as they propelled me up the front walk.

“I came to see why you left before the game,” he said.

My brows went up in surprise at hearing that he’d noticed me leaving.

“How did you know I did that?” I asked.

“Because I watched you walk away,” he said. “I kept expecting you to come back, but you never did.”

No, I never had.

I didn’t tell him that, though, and instead continued to walk through my house, knowing that he’d followed.

“This is…nice.”

I laughed under my breath.

“This is garage sale finds,” I muttered. “The house came partially furnished from the previous occupant.”

Well, partially furnished was more like fully furnished. She’d left everything but the food in her fridge. The stuff in her pantry she hadn’t bothered to take.

Which left me wondering what had made her leave as fast and as recklessly as she had.

Did someone catch up with her? Her past?

Was she okay, wherever she was now?

Those worries were just my general worries now. I was known as a worrywart—or used to be anyway.

“Lark, are you sure you’re okay?”

This time worry was in his voice again.

I cringed.

What the hell was going on with me? I hadn’t been this spacey in months!

Then I realized why I was acting like this. It’d been Harold’s threats.

Last week it’d been the threat of taking my house away. This week it’d been the threat of telling people I wasn’t who they thought I was.

Sal wouldn’t need much. Just a tiny little nibble on a line, and he’d have someone here to investigate it.

It wouldn’t take long from there.

Sal had a lot of money.

I liked to say it was more than Bill freakin’ Gates, but that would be an over exaggeration—but only barely.

If he lost a hundred-dollar bill, he’d be more upset that the thickness of his wallet was throwing off his perfect posture causing him to appear less than the superior person he deemed himself to be then he would’ve been over the fact that he lost the money in the first place.

No, it’d take more than the loss of a measly hundred dollars to have him worried.

I once overheard him talking to his accountant who said that he couldn’t find ten thousand dollars, and Sal had just waved him off like he was an annoying flea. “Just mark it as a loss, and go from there.”

Those words had haunted me from the day that I’d heard them.

I could’ve taken that ten thousand dollars and lived off of it for the first few months that I hid from him.

I could’ve done a whole lot of stuff with that money.

So much that it still made me angry to this day that he’d been so nonchalant about losing it.

The asshole.

Then, come to find out, he hadn’t ‘lost’ the ten grand at all. Sal had given it to some random waitress who he’d thought was excellent at serving him his steak.

It hadn’t even been our waitress that he’d given it to, but literally, the woman that had placed his steak in front of him.

“Lark.”

It was the hands this time that brought me back to the present.

“You’re kind of scaring the shit out of me,” Baylor said. “What’s going on?”

I grimaced. “Bad memories.”

He stared at me, studying my face, and then nodded once. “Have those myself.”

I smiled, but the smile didn’t reach my eyes.

He noticed that, too.

“Why are you here?”

He didn’t answer.

Or at least, not for a long time.

“I’m here because I want to be here,” he finally said. “I—”

There was a commotion outside—a lot of yelling, screaming and word hurling—that had Baylor and I walking out onto my front porch.

I wasn’t surprised by what we saw in the least. At least, not by the altercation that was going on in the middle of the street.

It was the man that surprised me.

I’d expected Travis, or maybe his wife to say something. What I hadn’t expected was some random man.

A random man who was utterly, stunningly gorgeous.

His hair was black, and his eyes were even darker.

He was wearing a black t-shirt, dark washed blue jeans and a black baseball cap. His eyes were ahead, focused solely on Harold, who was being surrounded by three very upset looking ladies.

The three ladies were yelling at Harold—well, yelling was probably too strong of a word. More like they were having a strained conversation that clearly had to do with the tow truck that was backing up to Kennedy’s car right that very second.

Well, it was trying to at least, but Evander was standing in front of her car.

His ass was leaning against the hood, blocking the tow truck from getting to the car, with his arms crossed tightly over his abdomen.

I had a feeling that he wasn’t angry as much as he was waiting to pounce.

Oh, and he was blocking the tow truck from getting to him by continuing to lean casually against it.

A man got out and started speaking in low tones to Evander, but moments after the conversation started, it ended and Evander turned to me.

“You reported the car?”

I shook my head frantically. “No, I didn’t.”

Having that man’s attention solely on me felt like I’d just stuck my finger in a live socket.

Though they were chills, they weren’t good ones like the ones I got with Baylor. These were ones that spread down my spine as Evander stared at me with open anger on his face.

“I have the complaint right here. Brown car parked in front of 1992 Liberty Lane.” He pointed to my house. “That’s you.”

“It might be me, but I didn’t call anyone.” I paused and narrowed my eyes at Harold. “I’ll bet he did, though. Gave me a ticket for it and everything.”

Evander turned his gaze to Harold, too, and would’ve paced over there to deal with it if the tow truck driver hadn’t been standing there, just waiting for him to leave.

“I don’t know who called in the tow, but it wasn’t me,” I apologized to the tow truck driver. “You can go now.”

Mr. Tow Truck Driver didn’t even hesitate to turn around and get back in his truck. More so, he didn’t even look back.

“Damn,” I said. “That look on him is quite intimidating.”

“Don’t worry, he won’t hurt you.”

“It’s Baylor here that you have to worry about,” came someone’s reply.

I jumped what felt like eight feet and whirled, staring at the dark-haired man who’d been waiting for this situation to resolve itself.

But the more that the ladies yelled at Harold, the more belligerent he became.

Little fucker was just that…a little fucker.

He was annoying, and I wanted nothing more than to shove my fist into the bastard’s face.

But that was done for me when Harold said something to Kennedy.

With practiced ease, he walked straight up to Harold, yanked the ticket book out of his hand, and shoved him so hard that poor, roly poly Harold almost went face first onto the ground.

The only thing that saved him from kissing the pavement was the car—Kennedy’s car—which he’d been trying to get towed.

It was really quite ironic if you asked me. Poetic justice.

“Go away and don’t come back,” the dark-haired man ordered to Harold. “If I catch you giving tickets like that again, I’ll be sure to do the same for you.”

“You can’t do that,” Harold said. “I’m the president of the HOA. I can write as many tickets as I want.”

“My name is Rafe,” he said. “Anytime you feel like writing a bogus ticket from now on, I’ll do my level best to slap you so fast and hard with a lawsuit that I know you won’t be able to get out of it.”

With that, this Rafe guy walked over to Travis’ porch, took a seat next to some kids, and proceeded to start playing a thumb war with a young girl that had to belong to Hannah.

My eyes were wide as saucers when I turned to Baylor.

“I should’ve recorded that,” I told him. “Who is that Rafe guy?”

“Rafe is Rafe. I don’t really know why he’s here. I have a feeling that he’s working for us because he’s doing something else, and the two jobs just coincide and working at Hail Auto Recovery just works well for whatever he’s actually doing here. I don’t know him all that well, and honestly, I’m surprised that he’s even here to begin with. He does, however, rent a house in this neighborhood.” Baylor snorted. “You want to go over there and eat some barbeque?”

I looked over at Travis’ lawn, which was now filled to the brim with people. Some of them I recognized from around town, while others I’d never seen before.

“No, not really,” I told him honestly. “I’m not much of a party person…or a crowd person.”

With that, I walked inside and let the screen door shut behind me.

I expected not to be followed, but I was.

The moment that I rounded the corner into my kitchen, Baylor was back, this time sitting at my kitchen counter.

“Why are you still here?” I asked again.

I was vulnerable and raw, and to be honest, I didn’t want him there.

He saw too much.

His over-attentive eyes were always on me, and it felt like he was looking into my soul.

He was the type of man who I knew could hurt me, too.

Charismatic, smooth, and overall, a really likable guy.

Just like my ex.

I steeled my spine and waited for him to answer, determined to tell him to leave once he was done explaining.

Only, I didn’t count on Baylor being well…Baylor.

He had a way of changing my mind on everything I thought I knew.

“I’m here because I want to be here,” he said. “And you’re right. Going over there where everyone can ask me ‘how the fuck I am’ and want a plain generic ‘good’ when all I want to tell them is ‘I’m fucking tired’ doesn’t sound like a fun time. In fact, I fucking hate parties. I hate putting on a happy face and being polite. I hate it.”

I watched him for a few long seconds, judging his sincerity.

Maybe we both needed a break from reality.

Tomorrow… tomorrow, I would do the right thing. Tomorrow, I would make sure that he knew that I wasn’t interested in anything that had to do with an ‘us.’

Tomorrow, I’d tell him that this wouldn’t work out.

Tomorrow, I’d be the adult I needed to be.

But today? Today I was going to do what I wanted to do.

And Baylor was the thing I wanted to do.

And I knew the moment that he realized that I’d given up and gave in.

Because between one second and the next, he had his arms around my waist, pulling me in close to his chest.

“One night,” I told him. “One single night, and that’s it.”

“One night.”

He was lying.

I could read it on his face and in the way he spoke.

Tomorrow, he’d be right back where he’d been today. Tomorrow, he’d invade my space.

But tomorrow, I’d be stronger…right?

I’d be able to resist him. I would.

I should’ve known that trying to resist Baylor Hail would be futile.

I didn’t, though.

Instead, I broke my cardinal rule.

To never get too close to anyone again.

I got too close.

And I liked it there.