Chapter Eight
WHEN THEIR LIPS finally parted, Sarah turned away and fixed her shirt, avoiding his gaze. Bones reached for her, and she stiffened.
He smoothed his hand down her back and said, “Sarah, there’s no reason to be embarrassed.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t just suck on a man’s thumb on a first date.”
He gathered her hair over one shoulder, trying to see her face, but she kept turning away from him. “Here, darlin’, let me fix that.” He lifted her hand and sucked her thumb into his mouth.
She yanked it away with a sexy laugh. “It’s different for guys. It’s expected. I’m not the kind of woman who does that, and I don’t want to be that person in your eyes. I just got swept away in the moment.”
“First of all, you’re right about perceptions, and that’s got to suck from a woman’s perspective. But not all guys are like that. I haven’t seen you as anything other than a strong, guarded woman and mother who also happens to be sexy and beautiful. What we did doesn’t change that. If anything, I feel closer to you because you let me in.”
She faced him then, her cautious eyes sailing over his face. Could she see that he was being blatantly honest? Did she want to see it, or was she too scared? Or worse, had he somehow misread the situation?
“Did you feel pressure to be close to me? Because if you did, I—”
“No,” she interrupted. “It’s not that. I wanted to kiss you. I wanted to do more than kiss you. I’m just…I told you I have baggage. I’m better at being friends than I am at this, and I’m not even very good at being friends. I’m always waiting for the smiles people wear, the kindness they share, to peel off like shed skin, revealing monsters I don’t want my children to see.”
He gritted his teeth against the anger simmering inside him for whatever she’d gone through that had left her so scarred. He flattened his palms to his thighs to keep them from curling into fists. “Because of the situation you grew up in? Or the father—or fathers—of your children?”
She pressed her lips together, her arms circling her belly, as if to protect her unborn child from hearing what she had to say. Then she lifted her chin, squared her shoulders, and said, “Both.”
The word devastated him like a bullet to the chest. “Sarah…?”
“My father was abusive to me and Scott, emotionally and physically, but luckily, not sexually.” She didn’t look away, didn’t flinch or slow down, as if she were talking about someone else. “By the grace of God, he didn’t touch Josie. But for whatever reason, Scott and I were targets. When I look back now, I wonder why I never told a teacher or the police. Anyone. But when you’re in the thick of it, all you think about is surviving from one minute to the next. Walking on eggshells. Trying to figure out what you did wrong every time you got hit or yelled at. I’d see kids at school, girls holding hands with boys, kissing in the halls, passing notes, and I’d wonder what that must be like. Why weren’t their parents calling them sluts? Or were they? Did they have bruises on their bodies, too?”
His heart broke, and his anger mounted with every word she said. He moved closer, taking her hand in his, and held on tight, wishing he could have been there to protect her.
“I used to hide in the bushes and write stories about a girl my age and how she’d fall in love with a boy and run away. They were just silly stories, but they were my stories of hope. They gave me a place to disappear into my imagined world, where a boy would want to hold my hand, carry my books. Where my parents would read to me or smile and tell me I did a good job instead of saying I was a tramp or a whore for doing nothing more than getting my period.”
She looked away with a nostalgic glimmer in her eyes that blew Bones away. How strong did she have to be to survive such an upbringing? To create a shred of hope and to become the woman she was today?
Her expression darkened, and she said, “As Scott got bigger, he fought back. What Scott didn’t mention the other night at dinner was that my father beat him up really bad the night he left. I’ll never forget. I thought they were going to kill each other. Scott got him good, too, but my father’s a big man, and even if he was almost six feet tall, Scott was only a teenager. Josie and I were a mess, crying and screaming, begging them to stop. My mother was hollering at us, slapping me as I tried to pull my father off Scott. Josie huddled in a corner. God, she was so small at thirteen, I remember thinking if they ever hit her, she’d break.”
She swallowed hard, fighting tears. Bones reached for her, but she pulled away.
“Please don’t,” she pleaded. “Just let me finish, or I’ll never get it out.”
It took every ounce of restraint not to haul her into his arms. He nodded, jaw tight, hands fisted.
“I tried to break up the fight,” she said softly. “But my father went after me, so Scott told me to take Josie downstairs. That’s where our bedrooms were. A few minutes later Scott flew down the stairs and into his room, panting and bloody. He grabbed a duffel bag, which he must have packed earlier. He told me and Josie not to go upstairs no matter what until the next day. I guess he’d been planning on leaving for a while, because he had a fake ID, and he gave me a bank card and said to guard it with my life. He’d had a friend open a bank account for me. He said he’d get a job and send money to that account so my parents wouldn’t know. I wanted to go with him, but my father threatened to have Scott arrested and thrown in juvie.”
“Jesus, Sarah. What about your mother?”
She shook her head. “She’s a waste of a human life. She was just as bad. She’d slap me and Scott around, call me awful names—slut, bitch, whore. I’d never even kissed a boy. I used to wonder if Scott and I were adopted or something, but…” She shook her head. “I know Bradley told you she was dead. I told him they were, but I have no idea if they are or not. I don’t ever want them near my children.” She inhaled shakily and said, “Things got better for a while after Scott left, and I thought maybe my parents had realized they’d run him off and were trying to change their ways. But then I came home one day and found my father in my room. He’d torn it apart and he was holding one of my notebooks. The others were shredded all over the floor. My mom and Josie were gone. That was the day I got the worst beating of my life. When my mom and Josie didn’t come back that night, I thought my mom had come to her senses and tried to save Josie. I knew she’d never save me. The next morning I packed what I could in my backpack, like I was going to school. My father worked at restaurants. He was a cook, but he also worked as a janitor for a company, so he was always working weird hours. He was still asleep that morning when I left. I went straight to the bank, cleared out the account, which had about four hundred dollars in it. I don’t know how Scott got the money so fast. He still won’t tell me. I took half of it and left the other half for Josie with a note telling her I’d come back as soon as I had a place to live. We had a secret place we left notes for each other, in a crack in the foundation of the house out back behind the heat pump. I knew I had to get away while I could, so I went to the main drag and hitchhiked.”
It was all Bones could do to let her speak without unleashing his anger.
“I must have had a guardian angel that day, because a girl named Susan picked me up on her way out of town. She’d hooked up with some guy at the military base and was heading home to Orlando. She was nineteen and worked at a salon. She let me stay with her, and after a week, when my bruises weren’t as noticeable, she got me a job as a shampoo girl. They paid me under the table in cash. I was going crazy worrying about Josie, so the next week when Susan had time off, she took me back and we waited for Josie after school, but she never came out. I saw a girl Josie knew, and she said she saw Josie leave in a car with some guy two days earlier and she hadn’t seen her since. She thought the car was blue, but it could have been gray; she wasn’t sure. Susan and I went back to the house, and I snuck around to check our hiding place. Josie had left me a note that said she was afraid to wait any longer. She found a way out and she took it.”
Bones felt sick with rage. He wanted to hunt down her parents and slaughter them. “She was thirteen? Did you find out who she left with?”
Sarah shook her head. “Susan and I drove around all night, but…” She shrugged. “I thought I lost her forever, and I didn’t know how to get in touch with Scott. I had no idea who his friend was who set up the bank account, and I just felt lost and scared—”
“But you had Susan; that’s something.”
“Not really. She helped me look for Josie over the next couple of weeks as time allowed, but then she got scared that she’d get in trouble. She drove me to a homeless shelter the next night, but I was worried they’d send me back to my parents. I guess she felt bad, so she gave me two hundred dollars and her driver’s license and dropped me off at the bus station. I bought a train ticket to Baltimore. I got another job at a salon as a shampoo girl, and I was sleeping out back in the bushes by the salon. One night I woke up to a guy grabbing at me, so I took off and finally went to a shelter. I had Susan’s ID, so I used her name there just in case. I had no idea how the shelters worked with minors, and I wasn’t taking any chances. After a few weeks, I met a girl named Reagan at the shelter, and we hit it off, and we rented a room together. Eventually I met Lewis Warsaw, the father of my children. I went to cosmetology school, and a few years later he shed his skin, too.”
Bones ground out a curse and drew her into his arms. This time she came willingly, allowing him to shift their bodies so he could hold her closer. He lifted her legs over one of his, holding her against his chest, and pressed a kiss to her forehead, wanting to seek vengeance and protect her in equal measure. “Nobody will ever hurt you again. And before you tell me you don’t need saving, you’re right. You’ve proven that several times, but it doesn’t hurt to have backup.”
“IS THAT HOW you convinced Thomas to let you hang around? As backup?” Sarah’s lame attempt at humor didn’t work. Bones looked like he wanted to kill someone, and he didn’t even know the half of it. She wanted to tell him the rest of her story, but talking about it had thrown her right back into that awful house again. She was exhausted, and even with his arms around her, her insides were all knotted up.
“I stuck to him like glue,” Bones said. “Just like I have since I met you.” He hugged her tighter, making her smile despite the ugliness she’d just revealed.
“You are pretty sticky,” she said, breathing a little easier. “I’m okay, Bones. I survived, and eventually with some help from Reagan’s brother and his friend Reggie Steele, a private investigator, I was able to reunite with Scott. And then, with Reggie’s help, we were able to track down Josie.”
“That’s good, Sarah.”
“Sort of. She was bartending about forty-five minutes away. We had to call and leave messages at her work, because we didn’t have her number or a stable address. Reggie looked, but I guess she moves around a lot. She was less than receptive to our calls, but we kept trying. The area where she worked was pretty scary, so Scott and I decided to try to start over as a family here, with the hopes of eventually reuniting with her. The night of the accident I called the bar where she worked from the hospital, and she must have heard how upset I was because she didn’t hang up on me. But when she came to see us that night, she wasn’t the same person I remembered. None of us were. She was so hateful and angry. I don’t know why she feels that way toward us, but we’ve all been through so much. I guess I understand being angry at the world. She only stayed at the hospital for a few minutes and she hasn’t returned our calls since. I’m just glad she’s alive, and I have hope that maybe someday she’ll want some sort of relationship.”
“Have you driven there to see her?”
She nodded. “Once, right after Scott got out of the hospital. She no longer works at the bar, and they didn’t know where she was living or working.”
“Did they have a cell number for her?” Bones asked.
“I know it seems weird in today’s world, but they said she didn’t have one. I’ve had nothing, Bones. I know what it’s like to wonder where your next meal will come from. Believe it or not, cell phones really are luxuries.”
“I understand. Would you mind if I tried to track her down?”
“I don’t think she wants to be found. She knows we live here, and she hasn’t reached out.”
Bones didn’t push for an answer about Josie, which was good, because she wasn’t sure if he should try to track her down or not. She knew what it meant to want to leave a life behind, and if in Josie’s mind she needed to leave Sarah and Scott behind, as much as it hurt, maybe she should let her.
“Thank you for trusting me enough to share your past with me,” he said as he draped a blanket around her. “I’m sorry for everything you went through. I wish I could have been there to protect all of you, but I’m here now. I know we should get back soon, but I just want a few minutes to hold you.”
She didn’t try to be her own hero, or prove she didn’t need him, because in that moment, even though she missed her children, this was exactly what she needed. He was exactly what she needed. As he held her, expecting nothing in return, the tension inside her eased, and the soothing sounds of the water lapping at the boat came into focus. The amber lights twinkled against the dark sky, and she closed her eyes, sinking into his comfort.
Her baby kicked, and she guided his hands lower on her belly and placed hers over them. She felt another kick.
“Oh, man. That’s incredible, darlin’. This baby is strong like its mama.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the feeling.” She was talking about the baby’s kicks and Bones’s comfort.
“The miracle of life is a beautiful thing.” His big hand moved over her belly. “Hey, I have an idea. What are you doing Saturday?”
“I have to be at work at three. Why?”
“My buddy Nick Braden owns a horse ranch in Pleasant Hill. His dog had puppies a few weeks ago, and he’s got pygmy goats and chickens. It might be fun to take the kids before it gets too cold.”
She glanced over her shoulder. He still looked a little tortured from the information she’d shared, but beneath the shadows was the compassion and pure maleness that made butterflies take flight inside her. Would he shed his skin one day, too?
Will I ever stop waiting for the other shoe to drop?
“Are you asking me on a kid date?” she asked lightly.
“I took you and your kids out before I asked you on a real date. Remember the fundraiser?”
It was a day she’d never forget. Not only because he’d stuck to her like glue then, too, but because of how the community had come together to help her family.
“Come to think of it,” he said with a sly grin, “I picked you guys up, hung out with you, bandaged up Bradley’s scraped knee, changed diapers. I think that counts as a kid date. And I had lunch with you and Bradley the first week we met, remember? In the hospital?”
She’d never forget that day, either. He’d come in to check on her and the kids several times even though he wasn’t their doctor. Initially, he’d said he’d come in because Bullet had wanted to make sure they were okay. But she’d wondered why he’d kept coming back. It was in those first few days when her family was in the hospital that she’d first felt a connection more substantial than as an acquaintance to him. He’d sit down for fifteen or twenty minutes and talk, asking as many questions about how she was feeling as he did about her family’s healing.
“You mean when you came in and I was eating the food Finlay brought?” she asked, though she knew that’s exactly what he meant. He hadn’t eaten, but he’d stayed while she did.
“Yes. You were sitting on the edge of Bradley’s bed, wearing a pretty pale blue blouse and white pants. Your hair was piled on top of your head in a messy bun, like you hadn’t slept in days, and I knew you hadn’t been sleeping because you were so worried about your babies and your brother. I wanted to make sure you were at least eating. You were feeding Bradley.”
“You told me to make sure Mama got some, too,” she remembered fondly.
After her children were released from the hospital, he’d stopped by the house with bags of groceries and little surprises for the kids. He’d stuck around, making small talk, slowly becoming such a big part of their life, her kids looked forward to seeing him. She did, too, but until this very second, she hadn’t even admitted that to herself. He’d taken care of her in ways that no one else ever had. How could she have chalked that up to him just being a kind friend or a curious doctor? She was beginning to realize how skewed her views were, and she wondered if having her guard up for so many years had made her oblivious to even more acts of kindness.
“That’s right,” he said. “That should count as a kid date, too. And Bradley was my riding partner at the Halloween parade. Kid date. We also met Bear and Crystal for dinner with the kids and Scott a couple of weeks ago at Woody’s Burgers. Another kid date. I think we’ve been going on kid dates for a while now.”
Oh boy, he’s kind of right. Plus, tonight was a more intimate, and more revealing, evening than she’d ever shared with anyone. And yes, her desires had taken over, and that was a little embarrassing afterward—and very exciting during—but there was so much more than that between them.
She knew the risks of becoming too attached, and she also knew that no matter how much she fought it, how much she denied it, where Bones was concerned, her heart was already at risk. But she didn’t want to monopolize his time or become a burden. “Don’t you usually go riding with Bear and your friends on the weekends?”
“Sometimes, but a man has got to have priorities.” He brushed his thumb over her cheek and said, “Say yes, Sarah. Keep letting me in.”
God, he was looking at her that way again, like hearing her agree was all he’d ever wanted. A thrill of delight chased over her skin, bringing rise to goose bumps. She was afraid to believe this could be real between them, but every time she looked into his eyes, it felt too real to deny.
“Okay,” she said, reveling in the way happiness lit up his eyes.
She had never had many blessings to count, but right then, being in his arms and thinking about the way his family had embraced hers, she felt like a glutton. “I’ve never been particularly lucky, but my babies are my miracles. Reuniting with Scott was a miracle. Bullet finding us after the accident and everything that followed was a miracle. And for a girl like me, who wasn’t sure she’d survive to be seventeen, being here with you feels like a miracle, too.”
“It’s not a miracle, darlin’. It’s destiny.” He kissed her softly and then said, “And one day, hopefully Josie will come back and she’ll be on your list of miracles, too.”