Dream of You (30 page)

Jo hated this man, and up till now, she’d hoped to never meet him.

A wide, sinister grin split his face. “So he told you about me, huh? Guess we’re family now - ” a truth that left her shuddering in disgust, “ – can’t believe the kid got married.”

“Why’s that?” she asked and her hand slipped into her jacket pocket, curled around the remote on her key ring.

His snort was full of contempt for the child he’d sired. “He don’t know nothing about being loyal.”

Which couldn’t have been further from the truth. Her thumb hovered over the unlock button. “Well, we’ll just have to disagree on that.”

His eyes narrowed, until they were just little dark buttons sunk in his head. He was not, she figured, used to being addressed in such a way. “Hey.” He scratched at his chin and somehow, the gesture was almost threatening. “You wouldn’t happen to have a few bucks on you, would ya?”

Her heart rate doubled.

“That shitass, he owes me. Never gave me what Mellie left me when she went. And I been having a hard time.” He scratched his hair and she wondered if he had lice. “Down on my luck.” One shoulder lifted in a shrug that said
poor me, but what can I do? Just a victim of circumstance here.

Poor Hank – his beautiful, fragile wife had given him every cent she’d ever had to her name. Poor Hank – the little boy he’d beaten had grown into a
shitass who didn’t appreciate him, didn’t give him his fair share.

A shaking, all-consuming outrage was beating back her fear
. In her mind’s eye, she saw Tam on the edge of the bathtub, hands linked together, foot bouncing on the tile, the night they’d confirmed her pregnancy. He was terrified of being the kind of father Hank had been, even though that was impossible.
This man
had done that to Tam – had pervaded all the moments that should have been his happiest until he ruined things for himself, until he thought he didn’t deserve to go to school and have a family of his own.

Jo’s spine went stiff and she straightened up beside the car, hand going white-knuckled in her pocket. “And what makes you think,” she said, “that Melinda left you anything?”

His ex-wife had never told him
no
, and here she stood, challenging him. Jo knew that was likely to get her slapped; she also knew that giving this degenerate asshole money was never going to happen. She had one moment – while his brows were up in his hairline and the shock was plain on his face – in which to escape.

She hit the remote and her car door unlocked with a
thump
. “That shitass” -  her voice was laced with venom - “is the only accomplishment you have to your name, and you tried your best to ruin him. Go to hell.”

And she was in her car, doors locked, engine roaring faster than she could have thought. When he realized she intended to back over him, he stepped away, but his face was murderous.

As she glanced back at him through her rearview mirror, the wind pulling at his clothes, thick banks of gray clouds building up along the horizon behind him in an ominous way, the fear returned.

“I’m not afraid of your father,”
she’d told Tam.

His answer came back to her now:
“You should be.”

26

             
J
o thought she might burst into tears when she pulled up to the house and found the drive full of cars. Instead, she stared at her reflection in the drop down mirror on her sun visor until she thought her expression didn’t scream
I just told Hank Wales to go to hell
.

             
Tam met her at the backdoor, slipped an arm around her shoulders and leaned down to whisper, “This was your mom, not me,” against her ear before her family – sans Walt of course – descended on her with birthday wishes. The company helped, though – distracted her – until her run-in with Hank might have been a bad dream floating detached somewhere in the back of her mind. His lurking, poisonous presence didn’t return full force until after dinner, shotgun in Tam’s car, a mint chocolate chip milkshake melting in her hands.

             
“Is it not good?”

             
A gnawing, acid sort of guilt had kept her from questioning the fact that they were parked in the drive of the neighborhood clubhouse, under the shaggy cover of the pine trees that bordered the lot, the inside of the car bathed in shadow. The house was locked up for the summer, the pool covered, all tucked in and holding its breath for the winter that was coming. The houses on either side were hulking shadows against a deeper dark of night, golden blocks of light marking upstairs windows – bedrooms and bathrooms. No one would be able to see them, though. They were locked into their own little world of old vinyl seats and her melting milkshake, alone save for her swelling guilt.

             
“No, it is,” she said, working her straw against the lid with an awful
squeak
as if that proved the point. She had no appetite, though, and she offered the shake to Tam. “Just not hungry enough is all.”

             
She suspected he gave himself brain freeze the way he sucked it down, the dregs slurping at the end of the straw when he hit bottom.

             
“Does your head hurt now?”

             
“Nope.” He leaned forward – the zipper on the cuff of his leather jacket catching some stray light fragment – and set the Styrofoam cup up on the dash. When he slid across the wide bench seat so he was right up next to her, and his hand reached up and found her stud earring, took it between thumb and forefinger and massaged her earlobe, she knew his eyes weren’t glowing in the dark, not really, but they seemed to. That same magical, mysterious little beam of light glinted off the sharp points of his canines as he flashed her a smile she hadn’t seen in a while.

             
Her heart gave an unexpected stutter, a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth. She felt sixteen again – pulse thumping, stomach fluttering – like she’d tumbled headlong through time and was the inexperienced kid she’d been back then, everything that meant anything wrapped up in the smile he was shooting her through this dark car, his touch hot on her skin. He transformed in front of her; as his hand slid down the back of her neck, his thumb running along her pounding carotid, she saw him as he’d been at nineteen, all dark hair and blue eyes, leather jacket and tongue ring glinting on the other side of his shark smile. For one perfect, precious moment, everything that ate at their sanity melted away into the shadows, and the crackling energy that arced between them was nothing but bright, sparkling memories of all their moments in this car and all the things she’d let him teach her in it.

             
“What
are
you doing, Tameron?” Her voice had become the helpless, breathy murmur she’d always been just a little bit ashamed of.

             
“You said no presents.” His smile really was going to be the death of her one of these days.

             
“You bought me a milkshake,” she reminded, even as she leaned back against the seat, her neck going limp in his palm.

             
“That I drank.”

             
“Still counts as a present.”

             
He rolled his eyes and scooted closer, until the soft, worn leather of his jacket was against her chin when she tipped her head back to look at him. She put a hand on the white cotton of his t-shirt and felt the leaping pulse that gave away the calm he radiated. She’d always loved that; even when she felt at her smallest, at her most vulnerable and in need of protection, tucked into him like this, she’d relished the proof that he wasn’t so smooth and cool and in control as he looked, that his heart knocked against his ribs the way hers did.
“I guess he’s cute, if you’re into that look,”
Jess had said years ago, nose lifted in disdain. Jo didn’t think “cute” even began to cover it. She’d seen cute all over the place and no other man could claim to have snatched the breath out of her lungs; but it wasn’t physical, not really, not deep down. He radiated something that wasn’t sex or mystery, not danger or excitement.

             
Tam was home. He was warmth and trust and the kind of pulsing, thriving, desperate love that she’d never had any control over. In the shifting black shadows the pine trees, his hair teasing her forehead in soft spikes, his breath mint chocolate chip when it hit her lips, he was her past, her present, her future; this timeline of smiles, touches and pulls at her heartstrings.

             
“I thought we’d go parking,” he said in the low undertone that meant he was about to kiss her and it was about to be spectacular. “Like we used to.”

             
Like her eighteenth birthday, in the swirling gray fog of dawn. Before he’d broken her heart. Before he’d come back to her, beaten down and wrecked inside. Before Hank had come up behind her in a parking lot and struck a match to this new, consuming fear that somehow, she might lose Tam again.

             
She had to tell him, had to, but she didn’t want to tonight. Because time and a wedding band and a baby growing inside her hadn’t slowed her heart or made the kiss any less sweet. Tonight, she wanted them to be the kids they’d been seven years ago, so she slipped her arms around his neck, speared her fingers through his hair, and did just that.

**

              “At what point does your brain actually turn off for the night?”

             
“It doesn’t,” Ellie said from the roll-top secretary tucked away in the corner beyond her nightstand. The bedside lamp drew sinuous curves through her tousled hair where it fell around her shoulders, sliced a bright porcelain wedge along the ridge of her dainty nose. She was wearing his green and black flannel shirt and nothing else, the sleeves gapping at her wrists, the fabric hanging off her slender frame, a length of creamy thigh bared all the way up to her hip where the fabric had pooled in her lap. She sat in her little pretend, antique chair, black-nailed fingers flying over the keys of her laptop, reaching with one graceful, arched foot to turn on the printer with her big toe.

             
On his stomach in her bed, Jordan folded his arms up under the pillow and stretched until his spine cracked. She had nice sheets, the high thread count kind he would never have shelled out for himself. As much time as he spent naked between them, he was starting to think being a fabric snob wasn’t such a bad thing.

             
“You know,” he feigned thoughtful, stifling a yawn, “I’m not one and done. You gimme a minute, and I can go again.”

             
Her fingers stilled and her hair slid off her shoulder as she turned to give him the sweetest, most patronizing smirk he’d ever seen. “Oh, I know. I just wanted to get this printed out.” She’d gone leaping out of bed in the pitch dark, an “oh” leaving her lips as she’d snatched up his shirt and clicked on the lamp.
“Inspiration,”
she’d explained while her computer had booted up, and he supposed he was flattered, even if he was just the slightest bit disappointed to lose her warmth in the bed beside him.

             
“That was convincing,” he snorted. “Kick me in the balls how ‘bout it.”

             
Ellie rolled her eyes – a flash of silver – as the printer groaned and beeped and started belching out paper covered in cramped, eleven point font. “Give me five minutes to go down and cut a slice of experimental gingerbread cake for us, and then I’ll do something
much
nicer to them.”

             
“Take your time.”

             
“Uh-huh.” There was something akin to cockiness dancing in her eyes as she slid up out of her chair like a burlesque dancer and came to the bed to drop a kiss amidst his messy hair before she left him. Calling her
girlfriend
had stripped away her outermost layer of doubt and brought her more confident, stunning, bedroom side to her already radiant surface. Beautiful already, she was now glowing, and he’d thought their waiter at dinner would choke on his own tongue when she’d smilingly asked to have their chips and salsa refilled.

             
He’d started to mention, at dinner, that he’d finally met her elusive Gym Guy. But then she’d turned that smile on him and he’d tucked the notion someplace safer. What would he have told her, anyway? That Kyle wasn’t just an idiot for turning her loose, but was a certified, pompous, meathead dumbass too? She knew that already, and bringing up the past would have only proved damaging to the shimmering aura that was coming off her in waves.