Behold the Stars (31 page)

Isaac lifted her hand to his lips. “You ready to get your party on, Sport?”

Curling her fingers around his, she pulled his hand to her lips, too. “Yep. Let’s make merry.”

~oOo~

The party didn’t exactly go off without a hitch, but it was a success nevertheless. Badger’s friend, Billy, was in a country band that was just getting started, and the Signal Bend Christmas party was their first paying gig. There had been a lot of hitches getting them finally playing, but they weren’t so bad, once they started. Lilli hated country music, but the crowd got to dancing almost right away.

The food turned out well. The club girls wandered around as servers, something they were used to, and C.J. played a particularly rough-looking Santa, handing out gifts to the kids. People were laughing and dancing, and having a good time. Lilli felt proud.

About ten o’clock or so, when the families had almost all left, and Billy and the Kids (Lilli had rolled her eyes when she’d heard that name) were packing up, the mood changed, and the holiday party began to take on the features of a regular drunken orgy at the clubhouse. Lilli headed to the kitchen to check on the cleanup and stay out of the way.

Isaac found her there and took her hand. “Leave the girls to do all this, Sport. They’re not going anywhere anytime soon.” He winked at Gwen, who was turning on the dishwasher. “But you are. Time to go home. I want to be alone with my wife.”

“Isaac.” She hesitated, pulling back a bit on her hand, hoping he didn’t mean he wanted sex for Christmas.

He met her eyes when he felt her pull and smiled a little, shaking his head, reassuring her. “It’s okay.”

Hating that she needed that reassurance, hating herself for not being able to put her shit behind her, she smiled and said, “Okay. Gotta get my bag, then let’s go.”

~oOo~

The dreams were so much worse now. The first couple of days, when she’d been taking the painkillers, she’d been able to sleep without dreaming, but she’d gotten off the Percocet as fast as she could, because of the baby, trying to make the right choices despite her head’s crazy ideas about the pregnancy. Before, the dreams had been bad, and had driven her to tense wakefulness, but, even after Hobson, she’d been able to push them away almost instantly and go back to sleep.

Now, she almost never woke up alarmed, because she wasn’t able to wake up in the middle of the dreams. They played themselves out to their bitter, brutal ends, and she would come awake slowly, beset by phantom pain and a cloying sense of death and doom. Unable to shake it or face sleeping again, she’d get up and sit in the dark living room, or, sometimes, walk out to see the horses. Isaac let her go, or he didn’t wake, and she was glad. The heavy blackness she was feeling was not something she could share.

In the early hours of Christmas morning, Lilli came awake, the brittle pain and fear of the nightmare still acute in her body. Isaac’s heavy leg was hooked over hers, and she lay still for a moment, trying to find that strength she’d once had to shove the dreams away. It was Christmas. Isaac hated to be alone in bed. She should stay.

She couldn’t. She eased her leg from under his and got up. Pip, who’d been sleeping on a bottom corner of the bed, stretched and went to curl in the middle of her pillow. Wearing one of his t-shirts over a pair of boy-cut underwear, she left the room. She thought she’d go into the living room and just sit, but when she got there, she turned and went upstairs instead. She put her hand on the knob of the door into her office, but, again, she turned, and instead went into the room across the hall, the room Isaac was turning into a nursery.

The room had been locked up and neglected since his sister, Martha, had left home at sixteen, when Isaac was twelve. He’d be forty in March, so “stale and dusty” hadn’t begun to describe what they’d found in here. Isaac had stripped decomposing wallpaper from the walls and hauled an old, narrow wrought-iron bed out to the shed. He’d stripped the paint from the floors and had pulled the built-in shelves, weak from dry rot, down from the walls. Currently, the room was in the clutches of chaos—stacks of decaying boards from the shelves Isaac had pulled down right before they’d left for their trip, used buckets of paper stripper, a ladder, piles of rags—all the disarray that comes from renovation. Stacked against one wall were the supplies for the improvements—wood for new shelves and a window seat, stain for the newly bare floors, paint for the stripped walls.

It was wrong. All wrong. It was…a bad omen, or bad luck, or just plain bad news. Bad. There was no baby. She’d lost the baby in that fucking cold room, when those bastards had—that thought would not fit into words, what they’d done. But she hadn’t fought, not enough. She let them do it, and they’d taken everything. She’d thought she was being smart, not fighting, trying to live. But she hadn’t been smart. She’d been weak. She’d let them.

She’d given up. There was no baby, not anymore. Her hand on her damnably flat belly, she felt sure it was true. She was supposed to be more than eight weeks now, almost ten, mostly through the first trimester—shouldn’t something be different, if there was still somebody in there?

With a jolt, Lilli was overcome by a violent compulsion. No fixing this room up. It was wrong. It made a mockery of everything to make a room for a baby that was just a hope. She started gathering up the new boards, thinking she’d carry them outside to the fire pit and burn them away. She bobbled and dropped a board, giving herself a fucker of a splinter in the process, but she ignored that and picked up the errant piece of wood.

As she stepped out into the hallway, Isaac came up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time, his Beretta in his hand. He pulled up short at the landing, face to face with Lilli and her burden.

Decocking his handgun and tucking it into the back of his jeans—all he was wearing—he said, “Jesus fuck, Sport. What the hell are you doing?” Lilli could hear relief, concern, and more than a hint of irritation in his voice.

She found herself unable to put on her sanity face. He’d caught her naked in her turmoil, and she blurted out, “This room is wrong. I’m not pregnant. This room is wrong.” The words confused even her as she heard them leave her lips.

“
What?
” He leapt at her, ripping the load of boards from her arms, throwing them to the floor with a crash, and yanking her t-shirt up to her waist. Confusion wrinkled his brow as he took in her unharmed, unbloody, unswollen state. “Baby, are you hurt? Come on—I’ll get you to the hospital. It’s okay.”

“No!” She pulled back hard, feeling frantic, and overbalanced, landing on her ass in the middle of the dim hallway. And then she was crying. Fuck, she was sobbing. She was so tired. She couldn’t find the strength to hide all this from him.

He dropped to his knees and tried to pull her close, but she fought him off and wrapped her arms around her legs, turning her body into a protective ball.

“Baby, I don’t understand. Why do you think you’re not pregnant? If you’re hurting, let me take you to the hospital. God, baby, please.”

“No! It’s too late. I lost it…
then
. I let them take it. I let them.” She dropped her head to her knees and just bawled. She had no control over her head at all.

“Lilli, what—what do you”—he paused, and then she felt his body against hers as he sat down at her side, his arms coming around the shell she’d made of herself. “Oh, baby. No. We
know
that’s not true. We saw that little blurry blob thing, remember? It was little, but they said it for sure was a baby. Fuck. Lilli, no. Those sons of bitches didn’t take anything from you, from us. Our kid’s as strong as its mom. And you beat them. Baby, you
beat
them.”

Still sobbing, she could only shake her head. Isaac moved in front of her and grabbed her head in his hands to stop her. He made her face him. “Yes, you did. You won. We won. And you fought to keep you and the squirt alive. You won, baby.”

“It can’t be true. I’m empty. I feel empty. Isaac, what they—they…” She swallowed, and her throat clicked dryly. She hadn’t even been able to think the whole thought of the thing she was about to say. She didn’t know why she was saying it now, but the words were coming. “The
gun
, Isaac. The fucking
gun
. It can’t be true after that.”

His brows drew together in a violent grimace, and when he spoke, she heard a catch of tears in his voice. “I know, baby. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” His hands still cradling her head, he dropped his own head to her knees. “So fucking sorry.”

He knew? She hadn’t been able to talk about any of it. She couldn’t believe she was talking about any of it now. How did he—?

Bart. That damn camera. Oh, sweet Jesus. Did they all know?

Instead of freaking her out even more, that thought—that little bit of problem solving, deducing how it was that Isaac knew specifics about what had happened to her when she hadn’t been able to even think those thoughts—called back a sliver of her sense. She took a breath, and calm filled her.

“I can’t keep control of all the shit. It’s taking over in my head.” Her voice was quiet and steady. “I’m losing my mind, Isaac.”

He sat back, his hands moving to her legs, wrapping around her calves. “No, baby. You’re not. It’s just that you keep trying to do it on your own. You need to talk to me. You lock me out, and then you’re all alone in there, and I’m all alone out here. We don’t need to be alone anymore.” He lifted her left hand and kissed her ring. “Please talk to me.”

His face was wet with his tears. She loved him more than anything. So she tried.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“We’re getting a real good look today. Do you want to know?” The technician turned from the screen and smiled at them both.

“Yes. Please.” Lilli didn’t hesitate. Isaac heard the thin thread of anxiety in her voice that he’d become accustomed to over the past few months. He’d been rocked on Christmas morning to discover how scared, how
scarred
, his warrior woman was. He’d known she wasn’t all right—he could feel it like a low-voltage current under everything she said and did, especially when she thought he wasn’t watching—but he’d had no idea how high the voltage was in her head.

Fuck. He’d thought her dreams had been better, not worse. And he’d had no idea she couldn’t believe there was still a baby, or that she thought she was becoming sick like her mother had been. He felt like a goddamn asshole for not picking up on any of that. He’d been so wrapped up in his own guilt for what had happened to her, thinking that her distance was distrust of him, that he’d never considered that she might be tearing herself apart.

But God, it made perfect sense, once she’d finally let him in and told him. They’d sat on the faded runner in the upstairs hall for hours on Christmas morning, and he’d learned that his wife had been drowning in a mental hell. After what she’d been through, what they’d done to her, how
could
she believe that everything was okay? They’d torn her up. She’d confronted death—hers and the baby’s—and come to terms with it, sure neither could survive. And the world she’d come back to was materially changed, in large part because she
had
survived—more than that, she had prevailed. No wonder it felt unreal.

Jesus, she sucked at communicating. She was great at fighting, and at intuiting. She was even great at talking. She knew just what to say to help him, and just when he needed it. But her shit, the things that scared her or made her feel weak—no. She shoved it to the side until it spilled over onto everything else. It had taken him too long, but on Christmas morning, he’d come to understand that he’d always need to manage that, be vigilant about drawing her out. If he pushed right, he could get her to talk. Help her, the way she helped him. But this was all new to him, too.

Every little milestone—hearing the baby’s heartbeat for the first time, a few days after Christmas; the day her jeans stopped closing; the day she finally felt a flutter of movement inside her—improved her handhold on belief. After hearing the heartbeat, she’d let him go back to working on the room, but she wouldn’t come up to see, and she wouldn’t give him any input about the decisions he was making. The day she’d felt movement was the first day she’d stepped back over the threshold. Still, though, she hadn’t participated.

Tasha had suggested he buy a device that would let her hear the heartbeat at home, whenever she wanted, once she got a little farther along. She listened to that fucker several times a day, her hand on the growing mound of her belly. It had helped, become like a talisman, keeping her grounded. But still she resisted making any plans—at least not for the baby. She’d hurled herself into plans for the town and for her work, but couldn’t yet think about their family. That had to change. He was beginning to feel like
he
was the one who had it wrong.

He hoped it would be today. This scan, when they could both see they were looking at an actual child inside her, a child with a strong, steady heart, squirming and sucking its little fingers as they watched—this had to be the proof she needed to believe. His own heart was about to break his ribs. His child. His
child
.
Please, Sport. There. Right there. We’re okay.

She wanted to know the sex. Good. They hadn’t even talked about it, but he did, too. No surprises. She needed to know everything she could know.

The technician raised her eyebrows. “You’re sure?”

“Yes!” Maybe that was a little too much like a yell, but Isaac was on edge, and Lilli had already answered the fucking question.

The technician—she’d said her name, but Isaac didn’t give a fuck—flinched a little at the sharpness of his tone, but she recovered her smile quickly. “Okay.” She moved the scanner on Lilli’s round little belly, like half of a basketball. With her other hand, she moved a cursor on the screen. “That’s a perfect shot, see? Bottom, legs, umbilical cord. And right here…nothing. We have us a baby girl.”