He paused but I said nothing so he carried on.
“When that conversation went down, I’ll never forget it, the last thing she said was, ‘You find another, don’t watch her walk away.’ All I could think was how many times I’d forced you to watch me to walk away. ”
Thinking he still was carrying a torch for February, that was not what I expected to hear.
So much not, my eyes opened.
“And then it got worse. I thought about the one time I’d watched you, when you’d done the same as Feb, somethin’ I knew you were eventually gonna do, walkin’ to somethin’ you deserved to find, a man who would make you happy. And how I stood there watchin’ you walk away and thinkin’ how easy it was to walk away from you ’cause I did it always knowin’ I’d be back and how much it fuckin’ killed watchin’ you do it, ’cause at the time, I didn’t think I’d ever have you back.”
Oh my God.
“Ham—”
“February Owens is a good woman. She was good to me. I was good to her. And I care about her. But she was never gonna be mine, and it sucked, losin’ her, but thinkin’ on it, I knew that deep down from the moment I met her. And that’s precisely why I started it up with her. But, cookie, you were mine from the moment I met you. That mattered to me. I took care of it as best as I could, until I came to a place in my life where I could give you what you should have and lucked the fuck out you were available for me to give it. And that’s the big difference you gotta get.”
I tried again to cut in. “Darlin’—”
It didn’t work.
“And I don’t like thinkin’ about her because, like I said, it sucks losin’ her. Her man is not the kind of guy who wants me checkin’ in. But I gotta tell you, it’s more. And it’s more in a fucked-up way only because a man lost his mind and went on a killin’ spree in her name. She lost people she cared about and not in a quiet, slippin’-away kind of way. She watched someone get shot. She saw a friend of hers die. She’s gotta live with all that and do it with reporters and writers breathin’ down her neck, knowin’ movies are gonna be made of that mess and documentaries are gonna air on TV. You care about someone, you wanna be there for them and this is a time when I’d wanna be there for her. I can’t and, baby, that stings, too.”
“Babe—” I tried again.
But Ham kept going.
“So I don’t wanna talk about her because I lost her and she means somethin’ to me. But it upsets you so there it is. The thing you gotta take from all this is, Feb is not you. She was never an option. She would never be where you are right now. She wouldn’t give me that. And I always knew that. I also always knew, from the first time I said good-bye to you, that I was a special kind of fuckwit for doin’ it because I was drivin’ away from the best woman I’d ever known. And years have passed, Zara, and you’re still that woman. It’s just that now, I’m never gonna drive away. I’m never gonna leave you and I’m not gonna let you leave me.”
He stopped talking finally, but I couldn’t start.
I didn’t know what to say.
What I did know was, being the best woman he’d ever known was a lot better than his just caring about me. And his vowing he was never going to leave me wasn’t shabby either.
But he still had not told me he loved me.
Then again, I was Zara Cinders and until I was old enough to go out and make friends, only one person in my life loved me truly, completely, and unconditionally. And, even though she stepped up repeatedly to take beatings meant for me, eventually made me watch her go through a junkie stage, through empty hookup after hookup that didn’t mean a thing, and finally made me watch her essentially die, she never stopped loving me.
So I should probably learn to take what I could get.
“You with me on all this?” he asked when I said nothing.
“Yes,” I answered and I felt him let out a long, silent sigh.
I said no more. Ham didn’t either.
Then he did.
“You fight nasty, cookie,” he stated gently.
“Yeah, I do. When what I’m fighting about matters,” I replied.
“I get that,” he said. “What I don’t get is that you were in no state to start a conversation about Feb. You had to read I was not in a place where I wanted to talk about that, and you still threw it in my face, which was not cool.”
He was right.
However, he was also wrong.
“That mattered,” I declared and his hand came to my chin, moving it up so he could catch my eyes in the dark.
“All I’m sayin’ is, in future, wait for your right time and give me the same. Yeah?”
Seriously, I hated it when he was gentle and reasonable when I didn’t feel like being the same.
So I laid it out why I wasn’t.
“Ham, you’re the one for me and it doesn’t feel good knowin’ you don’t feel the same.”
“What?” he asked.
“You heard me,” I answered.
“Jesus,” he muttered, rolling into me so I took on a lot of his weight.
“Ham—”
“Cookie, quiet,” he ordered, his voice jagged and at that tone, I didn’t know what to expect so, even tired, I pulled all I had left close and braced. “Please, baby, I know a lot of shit is swirlin’, but pay some fuckin’ attention.”
“I am,” I snapped because I damned well was.
“Get this,” he stated, his voice not jagged any longer, but suddenly harsh. “That bitch walked into our home.”
The shadow of his face dipped close to mine, a move so swift I held my breath.
“Our home,” he repeated, saying that like the space we rented was sacrosanct. “And I don’t give a shit if that woman finally did right. My girl and I were fightin’, it was intense, it didn’t feel good for either of us, she takes off to blow off some steam and opens the door to my ex?” He shook his head. “No. Fuck no. I don’t give a shit she drives for hours to show me she’s changed, she wants redemption. Zara, babe, you do not open the door to our goddamned house and be confronted with that shit. Not ever. Not if I can help it.”
I’d been wrong. Rachel didn’t have the power to push Ham to extreme emotion.
It was me having to deal with her that had royally pissed him off.
But Ham wasn’t done.
“She showed me how it felt to be stripped of power when she aborted two of my children. Then she pops by out of the fuckin’ blue to do right.” He said the last two words with extreme sarcasm. “And in doin’ that strips my power fucking again by makin’ it impossible, unless I acted a bigger dick than I was or got physical, to shield you from that. The only thing I could do to protect you was hold you close and that is not cool. Not in any way.”
I was right.
His not being able to protect me was what pissed him off. And he didn’t put his arm around me because he needed me. He did it because he thought I needed him.
Okay, maybe I’d been a bit of a moron.
Ham still wasn’t done.
“The point I’m makin’ is, I do not feel that way about anyone, Zara. I’m a good man and I’ll take a friend’s back but no one gets that shit from me. Not ever. Not since Rachel. Not Feb. Not anyone. But you. Now, are you finally gettin’ how you need to start payin’ attention?”
“Yes,” I whispered because, finally, I was.
Ham still wasn’t done.
“Then play close attention to this. A man is not what he says, babe. He’s what he does.”
Was he saying what he actually wasn’t saying… but was?
“You care about me,” I stated quietly, testing my theory.
“Fuck yeah, Zara. I care about you enough to lay roots with you. I care about you enough to fight for your nephew with you. I care about you enough to make babies with you.”
His hand grabbed mine, yanked it up, and pressed it flat against his shoulder where the smooth, puckered skin of the ugly scar left by an ax marred his flesh.
“I care abo
ut you enough to take another one of these if a man was comin’ after you. Both my parents are dead. I got no siblings. I got no roots. The only thing I got, the only thing I realized months ago I’ve had for a long fuckin’ time, is what I’ve kept as close as I could until I was ready to take it all the way, and that’s fuckin’ you.”
That was me.
“I think maybe I’ve been kind of a bitch,” I blurted.
“I think you want what you gotta learn I’ll give when I’m ready to give it, honey,” Ham replied. “And until I’m ready to give it, you gotta pay attention so you’ll know you have it already.”
I had it already.
Like I thought when I was talking to Cotton.
Ham had never told me he’d loved me.
But he’d shown me.
That meant he loved me.
Man, oh man.
“Okay, now I think I need to kiss you and, maybe, go down on you to make amends for having my head up my ass,” I shared.
His body relaxed, the mood in the room shifted, and he dropped his forehead to mine.
“Sweet offer,” he murmured and the firm was out of his tone. It was filled with tender. “But I’m in the mood to go down on you. You get how you get when I do, we may switch it up and while I’m givin’, so are you. But you get distracted when I got my mouth on you at the same time you’re suckin’ my cock so I think it’s best one of us stays focused.”
And I had him back.
All that, fighting, heartbreak, Ham laid it out the way Ham always laid it out, I find I’d been a moron and he doesn’t rub it in my face or make me pay in any way.
He’s back to joking.
And offering to go down on me.
“You know I love you.”
I said it and then I couldn’t breathe because suddenly the entirety of Ham’s bodyweight was pressing into me. But only for a moment before he rolled us, taking him to his back, me on top of him, and he shoved my face in his neck with his hand cupping the back of my head even as his other arm continued to squeeze the breath out of me.
And finally, I paid attention.
So I said not a word. I just let everything he was saying to me without saying it flow through me.
It felt beautiful.
His hand and arm relaxed and his voice was soft but jagged when he replied, “Yeah, baby. I know.”
I tipped my head back and kissed the underside of his jaw.
Ham bunched my nightgown in his fist at my ass, murmuring, “Get this off, cookie. You might be tired but not too tired to sit on my face, which is what you’re gonna do right now.”
Usually, when Ham gave an order while we were on mattresses, I did what I was told mostly because I got a lot out of it.
This time, I deviated from Ham’s plan by shifting up and laying a hot, heavy, wet one on him.
Ham let me and he did this by participating fully.
It was sweet.
It was hot.
And I paid attention to that, too.
Then he let me go so I could take off my nightgown and sit on his face.
Which was exactly what I did.
Chapter Sixteen
Bury Him
Reece
Four days later…
Reece was running along the road by the boardwalk in town when a burgundy Jeep Cherokee passed. He saw the brake lights illuminate and, as he moved alongside it, he heard a woman shout, “Reece!”
He looked left and saw through the open passenger window that Nina was in the driver’s seat.
He jogged to the opened window and stopped.
“Yo,” he greeted.
“Hey, I don’t want to interrupt your run but I actually just called you, twice. I left messages but you obviously don’t take your phone with you while you run, and we really need to talk.”
The “really” was emphasized in a way Reece couldn’t ignore, not that he would, mostly because she looked excited, her eyes lit with a fire he hadn’t seen in them before, and she was normally fiery.
“You don’t mind me sweatin’ in your office, I’ll meet you there,” he told her.
“See you in a few,” she replied on a bright smile.
He backed away from the SUV. She took off, her hand waving as she did, and he followed her, his pace steady but faster.
She gave the impression she had good news.
Christ, please make this good news.
He entered her offices, sweating, breathing heavy, and when he did her receptionist was putting the phone in the cradle, her head coming right up.
“Neens says to go right on in, Reece,” she invited. “She just called. She’s comin’ in the back way. You should get to her office at about the same time she gets there.”
Reece nodded and moved to the hall toward Nina’s office.
Nina was still dumping her stuff on her desk and shrugging off her stylish coat when he struck his knuckles on her open door.
“Come in,” she said, waving at him excitedly and tossing her coat on the back of her chair. “And if you could shut the door?”
He moved in and closed the door as she rounded the desk and slid her round ass up on the front of it.
“Okay,” she launched in. “I’d offer you coffee, water, a towel but seriously, this is too good not to share and do it fast. I’ll get you that stuff after.”
“Spill it,” Reece demanded, his breath still heavy and his heart thumping deep, the latter not having anything to do with his run.
They’d had no recent news except Nina being frustrated with Xavier Cinders’ attorney’s stonewalling. She’d explained that this would happen. Nina was gung ho, but they wouldn’t be. She also repeatedly told them this was a process that didn’t happen overnight.
Even so, it was wearing on Zara. She was keeping a brave face, but if something didn’t give soon, Reece worried that mask was going to crack.
“Right, well, it’s about what Pastor Williams said. Do you remember I told you I thought what he said was curious but intriguing?” she asked.
“I remember,” Reece agreed.
“I didn’t want to say anything to you because I really didn’t understand what he was saying and I wanted to understand it before I mentioned it. So, I know we’re on a budget but I still thought it worth the risk to talk to our investigator. She’s good. Really good. We don’t use her often, not enough business for that, but she’s excellent. So I hired her for this job, limiting her hours, and she found it. I just had an early lunch with her and she told me all about it.”
Nina stopped speaking and Reece’s patience started slipping.
“And?” he prompted.
Nina smiled huge, an expression that belied her next words.
“Xenia’s care for nine years cost a fortune.”
Reece shook his head. “Not followin’, Nina.”
She leaned toward him animatedly. “Xavier kept her on life support in a private facility for nine years. That requires more than tubes and machines but staff time and lots of other stuff. Did you ever think to wonder how he could afford that?”
“Try not to think about him at all,” he answered.
Although that was true, the man worked at an aeronautical factory a county over. He was union, blue collar but skilled labor, and had worked there decades so he made a whack. But not that big of a whack. So even though Reece didn’t think of him, that didn’t mean he didn’t wonder.
Leaning back, she nodded. “Well, couple that with Zander Cinders going to a school that cost fourteen thousand dollars a year. Then add the fact that Wilona Cinders works a part-time job. And she does that and still can seemingly financially handle the upbringing of a young boy and the mortgage on a four-bedroom house even though her husband cut ties as in cut ties. They bought that house to fill it with children and when she couldn’t give him any, he divorced her, moved to Alaska, and left her with a house they had some equity in but still had fifteen years of a mortgage on.”
Not much had been happening with the case bu
t Nina knowing all this meant the woman had been seriously busy.
“Maybe you need to do the verbal arithmetic for me,” he suggested when she stopped talking again.
Instead of doing that, enjoying herself too much, Nina asked, “Has Zara ever talked about her grandfather Val Cinders?”
“He passed when she and her sister were teenagers. She liked him well enough, but bein’ a Cinders, only as much as he’d let her,” he replied.
She nodded, her eyes lighting further.
She was coming to the good stuff, thank fuck.
“Okay,” she continued. “Now, the Cinders being an old Gnaw Bone family, and I mean old, did you know that, before Val Cinders death, he sold huge tracks of land to Curtis Dodd? Land Dodd developed on. And that deal included Val Cinders getting a percentage of the profits off those developments.”
Reece felt his head jerk. “What?”
Curtis Dodd, who had been murdered a few years ago, was the town’s land magnate. He developed all over the county. Hell, you couldn’t drive through town without seeing his huge-ass, ostentatious house up the mountain, lording over it all. A house he built to do just that. A house that no one lived in now that his wife was in prison for conspiring to murder him.
Nina leaned in. “We’re talking millions.”
“And this makes you happy because…” he prompted.
“It makes me happy because Xenia and Zara Cinders were minors when Val Cinders died. That meant that the money he left to them, and when I say he left them money, he left them all of it, Reece”—Reece’s frame froze but his gut clenched as she went on—“was supposed to be held in trust for them. They were supposed to receive it when they reached thirty years of age. Xenia never reached that age and, therefore, her money should have gone to Zara or, alternately, Zander. But I’m guessing with all that’s happened to her in the past year, Zara never saw a dime. Which means Xavier stole it from her, used it to keep her sister alive against her wishes, and is using it to help his sister raise the son he also stole from Zara.”