“Think I’m gonna call you Daddy and we can just make up and get along?”
“No.” Her bitterness shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did. “But having one more friend can’t be all bad, can it?”
“Friends are there for each other. As far as I can tell, you’ve never been there for me.”
I had. But she wasn’t to know that.
“I can start now, can’t I?”
“Don’t you think it’s too little too late?”
My smile was sad. “It’s not too late until we’re dead, and I’m not going anywhere.”
I wasn’t sure why, but that seemed to trigger a response in her.
At first, I just thought she was going to slam the door in my face, my foot be damned, but then, after staring at me for a minute, she told me, “There’s a coffee shop around the corner. It’s where I work. We can talk there tomorrow before school. Seven AM.”
Stepping back, I unwedged my foot. “I’ll be there,” I said as she closed the door in my face.
I sagged against the wall, unable to believe that she was letting me in, but I knew if she was anything like her mother, the war would be hard won.
Thanks to a lifetime’s experience with Rachel, I was battle ready.
TWENTY-EIGHT
RACHEL
ALWAYS - GAVIN JAMES
I tried Rex’s phone three times a day. Before I started work, at lunch, and before I went to bed.
He’d ignored each of my calls since he left… until tonight.
When I hadn’t expected him to answer.
While I was in Rory’s guest bedroom as she snored away three bottles of Zinfandel on her sofa and I was in a semi-sugar-induced coma.
So, of course, he answered.
“Rex?” I blurted out when the call connected.
He didn’t utter a word.
“Rex?”
Silence.
“King?”
“What do you want, Rachel?”
I shivered at his cold tone which was more frigid than all the ice cream I’d consumed.
I wished I’d had a Zinfandel to make things easier on me, but I didn’t. Just a sugar rush and that really didn’t pack the same punch.
I knew I’d hurt him, and that gutted me.
“To apologize.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
I ground my teeth together at the bitter retort. “I don’t know why you would be.”
“Because you’re always sorry, Rachel. Always. It never changes anything though, does it?”
Feeling like I was choking, I stared blankly at the ceiling above the bed. I didn’t have an answer because what else was there to say?
Okay, that was wrong.
There was so much to say. So many things that I’d never mentioned before that were burning a hole in my tongue.
At this moment in time, the only man I had ever loved knew less about me than his MC brothers did.
He didn’t know that he was going to be a father again, didn’t understand that I’d been assaulted twice in my life, and didn’t realize how deeply those attacks had impacted me.
All of those things added to the choking sensation that gripped me, but for all that, the soft susurration of his breath in my ear had me closing my eyes.
I’d been on the brink of tears throughout his absence, but now, they burned as I finally let them fall.
“Why did you answer the phone tonight?”
“Because I met Wynter today, Rachel, and I knew the only person in the world who’d get what I was feeling would be you.”
I jerked upright at that, only I didn’t realize I was too close to the edge of the bed, because when my hand went down to support my new upright position, it encountered only blank space.
The second I registered that, I tumbled over the side with a yelp and narrowly avoided face-planting on the carpet.
It made a hell of a clatter when my ass collided with the floor, though, especially as it jolted the bed, and I heard Rex’s bellowed, “RACHEL?” from the other end of the phone.
Snatching up my cell, I panted, “Sorry. I just fell off the bed.”
“Are you being serious?”
I cleared my throat. “Yeah. Unfortunately.”
“Are you drunk?”
I wished.
I hissed under my breath a muttered, “Ouch.” Twisting, I rubbed my side and asked, “You met Wynter? Does that mean you’re in California?”
He paused. “You know where she lives?”
“I didn’t. Until Maverick told me that was where he thought you were going.”
“He told you that, did he?”
Confused by his tone, I murmured, “Yeah, a couple days after you left. He said he could be wrong, and that you might have headed to New Mexico. Either way, he was right, wasn’t he?”
Rex just grunted.
Silence fell between us.
I didn’t know what to say.
What to ask.
My side ached like a bitch, and where my hip had collided with the floor smarted like hell. But that was nothing to the twisted, gnawing pain in my heart. One that felt as though it had corrupted me soul-deep.
"It took you a while to get to California," I pointed out softly.
"I took it slow."
Slow was an understatement. It was the second week of January!
“Aren’t you going to ask how she is?”
“I don’t know what to ask,” I admitted honestly.
“Do you even care?”
My mouth tightened at that. “Of course I care,” I snapped. “Just because I don’t process things like you, Rex, doesn’t mean I don’t feel. If anything, I feel too damn much. That’s always been my problem.” I sucked in a breath. “Instead of making me feel badly about not knowing what to ask, why don’t you tell me why you answered the phone? You clearly wanted to share something with me.”
His hesitation didn’t make me feel any better.
“Rex?” I sighed. “King!”
Although, why he wanted me to call him that, I had no idea.
Nyx had been the first to earn his road name, I knew that much. But King had gained his shortly after. Him separating the two, making a differential between them, was unnerving.
I didn’t know why, exactly, it just was.
“Today, I only spoke with her. Tomorrow, we’re going for coffee before school.”
I had to think that the sugar and the lack of sleep and the exhaustion from work was turning my mind into mush because I couldn’t compute any of what he'd just said.
“Rachel?”
He had to know I was still there from my breathing alone; he had to know. I probably sounded like I was having an asthma attack which was a feat seeing as I didn’t have asthma.
Reaching up, I pinched the bridge of my nose and let the first words that came to mind drip from my tongue:
“What does she look like?”
I surprised myself with the question.
I hadn’t known what I was about to say until I said it.
Perhaps he was surprised, too, because he was quiet until he murmured, “Her situation’s unusual.”
That had me straightening up. “It is? Why?”