It Takes Three to Fly (22 page)

“She is perfectly harmless when it comes to the people she loves,” Landon informed him simply. “Katie-Anne likes to play tricks and pull pranks, and she loves to threaten, poke, and prod, but she never does anything that would really hurt her friends or family. Now, if you were someone she didn’t give a shit about, I would be worried about your safety. But she wouldn’t hurt either of us.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me, Landon. Our woman is diabolical.”

Landon snorted. “Not hardly. If she were half as vengeful as you think, wouldn’t she have carved off my nuts when I approached her for a chance to get to know her? Would she put up with all the shit Jaycee and Shannon pull on her without once doing something completely out of line? And would she have given you what she thought you wanted—an annulment—without a fight? Hell, she hadn’t been home a day, and she was in your arms and mine too. Katie-Anne is all talk.”

“I hope so.”

“I know so,” Landon assured Shane, “and I can prove it.”

“How’s that?”

Landon patted the seat next to him. “Come here, and I will tell you a little story about me and Katie-Anne.”

Intrigued about what Landon was going to share, Shane joined him at the top of the bed. Sliding close together, their sides touched from shoulder to toes, but there was nothing sexual there, only intimacy.

Shane’s lips twitched then turned into a full-blown smile.
I like this.
He’d never smiled so much in his life. It was as though the dead part of him had come to life, and he couldn’t keep it from showing on his face.
I really like this.

“Hear me out before you say anything,” Landon said hesitantly.

Shane nodded in agreement.

“Back in October, I started pursuing Katie-Anne. Actually, I hounded the hell out of her. I sent flowers, cards, and candy to her every day. Poor Penelope at Pretty Pedals was tired of seeing my lovesick face,” Landon remarked with an unapologetic smile. “I thought that was the way to Katie-Anne’s heart.” He shrugged. “But I was wrong. I was
dead
wrong. The more I sent, the harder she fought. She avoided me like I had the plague or something.”

Landon sighed. “I had gotten to the point that I needed to be with her. I thought she and I could move on without you. Yet again, I was wrong. We had no chance, but that’s not important at the moment.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, one day, I tracked her to Garrett’s Groceries with the help of Joe Johnson. I took off after her like a bat out of hell. Predictably, when she saw me, so did she. But I caught up to her and tackled her.”

“Tackled her?” Shane laughed his ass off at that, the mental image of the two people he loved writhing around on a street too much for him to hold in. “You tackled her? I bet she loved that.”

“Actually, she did,” Landon commented smugly. “But we are getting off track again.”

“Sorry,” Shane managed to say between his laughs. “I’ll stop now.”

Landon winked at him, making his laughs start up again. “It was pretty damn funny, Shane.”

“I’ll bet.”

Landon mock-punched Shane in the shoulder. “Be quiet so I can finish my story. I have other things to do today.”

Like me?
Schooling his features, Shane hid his amusement from Landon—or, at least, he tried. When Landon didn’t respond, he figured he’d done a good job. “Proceed.”

Landon nodded. “I apologized to her then I asked her to go to lunch with me so that we could talk. At first, she groused about how she was busy and all that shit, but she ended up going with me. We talked for hours, Shane.
Hours,”
he emphasized. “A vengeful woman wouldn’t have done that. That kind of person would have poisoned me with something that made my dick fall off or gave me an incurable disease, but she didn’t. She was nice to
me
because I was nice to
her
.”

Well, shit. Doesn’t that just kick me in the balls? My dumbass ways keep getting better and better.

“She cares so deeply, so intensely,” Landon remarked, but he sounded like he was talking to himself as much as Shane. “It scares her to death. Hell, it scares me. She wants people to care for her. She wants them to
know
her, but she is too afraid to ask.”

“Why?” Shane asked the same question he’d asked himself a million times today, the one he’d asked in the café that morning, too. “Why would she do that?”

“It is easier for her to have people hate her when they don’t know who she is inside. I don’t know all of her past because she is very secretive about it, but she’s told me enough to give me a good picture. She doesn’t believe that anyone would want to know who she is. She thinks she is unlovable.”

“What the fucking hell?” His question came out as a deafening roar.

Landon didn’t flinch. He just stared at Shane. “I told her how wrong she was, but it is hard to forget the things you’re taught as a child.”

The truth dawned on Shane as if he’d been hit over the head with a bat. “That psychotic bitch,” he growled, pushing his hand through his hair in agitation. “Her mother deserves everything she got.”

“I have a feeling she deserves more. But that is something we have to find out from Katie-Anne.”

“Fuck,” Shane cursed. “We have to show her how special she is to us.”

Landon shook his head. “No,” he disagreed firmly. “She isn’t the type of girl who enjoys grand shows of public affection. All she wants is the words and our promises. That’s it. Trust me.”

And he did trust Landon. So, over the next four hours, they gave their bodies a rest while they discussed how best to get their woman where she belonged—with them.

Cemeteries gave Katie-Anne the creeps, especially in the quiet of the early morning. And she would rather be beaten than be in one. But sometimes, a girl has to do what she has to do. With a slow drizzle around her, she flipped open her oversized yellow umbrella and made her way to the back of the graveyard where both her parents were buried, several plots apart.

It was funny to Katie-Anne how her father had specified that he not be buried next to her mother. His final request was that he be buried by Jaycee’s mother, Margaret. He’d loved her from the beginning and until the end. So it was fitting.

Pausing by her father’s grave, she laid a rose against the headstone before going on. “I miss you, Daddy.”

Katie-Anne did miss her dad. He’d been a hard man, but she’d loved him anyway. He’d been oblivious to her mother’s abuse until a week before his death, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t tried to stop it then. He’d cared about her, in his own way.

Looking back, Katie-Anne believed that might have been what sparked two murders and a suicide within the matter of a day. If her brother and father hadn’t tried to intervene and stop her mother from mistreating her, no one would have died. But, then again, they might have. Katie-Anne would never know, and she refused to dwell on it now that she was getting her own life, the life she’d always dreamed of.

One. Two. Three.
She had to count how far apart her parents were. Since she had only visited once, she couldn’t remember by sight alone. Finally reaching her mother’s headstone, she stared down at the inscription.

Isabella Blakemore 1959 – 2000.
That was it. No one had wanted to put anything else because there wasn’t much to say that would be appropriate for a gravestone. She’d been a bitch of the first degree who’d murdered her husband and sister before committing suicide, and it didn’t make sense to pretend any differently.

Besides, at that point, Gray had washed his hands of everything that involved their mother. He wouldn’t even come to her service after he’d gone to their dad’s and their aunt Caroline’s. Of course, no one had blamed him, especially not Katie-Anne. She knew the real reason why he hadn’t been there, even though most people didn’t. He’d wanted their mother as dead as she was.

At the time of their parents’ murder-suicide, Gray had been away at college. But he’d been on his way home when she’d heard the gun go off downstairs as her mother shot her father then shot herself. He’d been coming back with Cade in tow because he’d found out the truth. Caroline had told him everything.

He’d found out that Caroline was her biological mother, not Isabella. He’d found out how her mother had been lying for years and how she’d been blackmailing her own twin, Caroline, to keep her away from Katie-Anne. He’d found out everything, and he was going to kill her mother—if that was what it took.

Gray had never told her that, but she was no fool. He and Cade would have gone to jail before they let her suffer another day further. Not that it had mattered. Caroline, Isabella, and William were dead and gone before they ever pulled in the driveway.

A wave of disgust roiled in her stomach, making her morning sickness worse than normal. And she had to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth to keep from vomiting all over the grass. Absentmindedly, she rubbed her stomach over her paint-splattered sweatshirt.

“
Mother,
” Katie-Anne said, not even attempting to mask the sneer in her voice. “I have come here to give you a little present.”

Katie-Anne propped her umbrella against her shoulder, situating it so that she could toss down the blanket under her arm and reach into her pocket. Pulling out the folded sheet of paper she’d brought with her then unfolding it with one hand, Katie-Anne admired the painting she’d stayed up most of the night working on. It was an exact replica of her favorite one, the same one she’d given to Shane. The dove still appeared to be taking flight, and the words still read, “Fly Free.”

With a smile, Katie-Anne crouched down and placed it on the damp ground in front of her mother’s grave. She didn’t care that the picture soaked up a bit of the moisture, and she didn’t care that it would probably be blown away by the wind. It was the gesture. It was the meaning.

After this morning, she would move on, and she wouldn’t worry about her mother or her grave. Brooklyn’s statement rang true. She couldn’t forget the past, but she could move beyond it. And she would—starting today.

“Isn’t it
lovely
?” Katie-Anne inquired, using her mother’s favorite word.
Lovely
left a foul taste in her mouth so she altered her question. “Isn’t it great?”

Instead of squatting there awkwardly, Katie-Anne cleared her throat then answered herself, “Well,
I
think it is. Do you recognize it?” Again, she answered her own question. “You probably don’t, so I’ll be happy to remind you. It is a replica of the one you burned when I was a little girl.”

Katie-Anne squinted with a sigh, scanning the desolate cemetery. She didn’t want anyone to overhear what she had to say and, more importantly, she didn’t want to be interrupted before she could finish. “Personally, I think it is perfect for our talk because I am tired of staying on the ground, and I am so fucking tired of running away from everything. Running from myself and the people I love is exhausting. I have spent too many years pretending to be the pretentious bitch you wanted me to be.”

Katie-Anne wiped her cheeks with the back of one hand, ignoring the sound of her not-so-pretty and not-so-dainty cries. She pretended that she didn’t notice the snot seeping from her nose.

She looked like shit, and she knew it. But fuck what her mother thought. And fuck whatever everyone else thought, too. She loved herself, and her men loved her, even though Shane liked to pretend otherwise. Her friends loved her, as did her family. That was what mattered to her.

“Ironic, huh?” She asked with a self-deprecating laugh. “Everyone thinks I’m the person you trained me to be. I have the perfect hair that I brush with exactly three hundred strokes at least three times a day. I dye my hair exactly once every four weeks, but I have resorted to doing it at home. I know how much you would have hated that. But it’s just so terribly expensive when you don’t have the money.”

Katie-Anne threw her head back, making a grand showing of her long, dark hair. “What do you think? Personally, I hate it. I think something more colorful would be fun, but what can I say? People would surely talk about that eccentric Blakemore girl with no taste. Not that they don’t talk trash about me anyway,” she muttered under her breath.

“Oh! People tell me how pretty I am,” she told the grave with a slow shrug. “But I don’t know because I can’t see it through my fucked up vision. All I can see is the
unpretty
that you carved into my skin.” Lowering her voice, she whispered smugly, “But you fucked up when you didn’t cut deeper. No one can see it but me, and I am determined to get past that word. I will toss it out of my vocabulary, if it fucking kills me. I
am
pretty. It was you who was not.”

Tapping her chin, Katie-Anne pretended to deliberate her next words, even though she knew what she wanted to say. “Let’s see, I have the skinny body, but I quit using those laxative popsicles and smoothies. They were disgusting, so I upgraded to puking my guts out after every meal.”

Katie-Anne heaved a sigh then went on, “That didn’t last, though. I know how disappointed you would be that I had to check into a hospital for treatment, but we don’t always get what we want in life. Sometimes things are out of our hands.”