Love, Tussles, and Takedowns (13 page)

Hudson shut the TV off and pulled her into his arms.

He waited until he felt all her stiff muscles eventually sink into his hold before asking the question he hoped to hell he was wrong about, “Your parents didn’t die in a car accident or anything like that, did they?”

She stilled again for a moment before answering softly, “No.”

He kicked himself repeatedly for not having asked this whole time. When you hear both sets of parents died, you just assume… Dammit. Even if he hadn’t jumped to that conclusion, however, there was still no way he would’ve been prepared to hear what she was going to say next.

“My parents were shot at close range in our kitchen…a few minutes before the second shooter aimed his matching Glock 33 at me.”

* * * * *

HUDSON HAD NO words.

And even if he had been able to formulate some horribly inadequate sentence or two to provide her comfort, he would’ve shut himself up the second he saw that supremely grounded strength of hers wash over her.

What he’d thought were her best holy-shit self-defense moves back in the gym was nothing compared to the fighting she was doing now.

This fight he was witnessing before his eyes was that of grit. Of heart.

He watched her fight back invisible demons with everything she had.

And win.

The pain in her expression eased, and the gentle lines of acceptance softening her features soon declared her victorious. Because it was a victory. Hudson knew from experience that it took far more courage to bend than break, to seek peace when everything inside of you felt at war.

To
choose
not to harden your heart to anything that could make it vulnerable again.

And when the life returned to her eyes, along with hope and other emotions
he
wasn’t strong enough to dare name, she placed her hand over his right one and said, “Answer your phone. Tell whoever it is that I’m fine. Really.”

Wait, what?

All at once, he heard it—the clamoring sounds of three cell phones and one landline ringing, text messages chirping, instant messages pinging, and an incessant number of email notifications beeping in from the computer at the speed of Morse code.

Simultaneously erupting at the same time.

What the hell?

“The ‘Lia Alert System’ has been triggered,” she said drily as she double-fisted her personal and business cell phones while heading over to her laptop. “Remember my wrist watch with Gabe’s thoughtful enhancements? Let’s calm my brothers down first and then I’ll tell you about my parents.”

An incoming text message came in just as she started speaking into her two cell phones, held up to both ears.

>>> ANSWER YOUR DAMN PHONE.

Grouchiest alert system he’d ever encountered.

Looking down at his cell phone screen and seeing
GABE SPENCER
flashing in time with his now ringing phone, Hudson puzzled over how Gabe’s name was showing up as a saved contact on his phone and not a caller ID listing.

He hadn’t input any Spencers into his phone.

“Hello?” he answered on the next ring.

“Is she okay? What’s going on?” came the worried reply, followed by a whole lot of keyboard clacking and then a relieved sigh. “Oh wait, I just got the all-clear from Caine. Shit, man. Pick up your phone next time. I’ve been calling for three minutes.”

“Hello to you too, Gabe.”

“Oh, yeah. Hi. So is she really okay, or is she just trying to get Caine and Max off her back? Should I call her?”

Hudson looked over at Lia, who was currently texting on one hand, typing on her laptop with the other, and talking to someone on her landline via speaker. “I think she’s okay. We were just watching TV and she got startled awake. But she seems fine now.” She really did.

“Okay, well let me know if anything changes. All our numbers are programmed into your phone now. And our emails are input in your safe list now too.”

Uh,
thanks?
What exactly does one say for such a gross violation of one’s privacy?

Though he didn’t blame them.

Remembering how alarmed Gabe had been a minute ago, Hudson reassured him, “Next time, I’ll answer the phone.” Looking up and seeing Lia still talking to whichever brother she was on the landline with, he added, “But just so we’re clear. If I’m here, I’m going to be the one to make sure she’s okay, to listen if she needs to talk, to make her feel safe if she doesn’t. I’ll call or text you guys back to let you know she’s okay, but I’m not going to pass any of that over to you. Not anymore. If I’m with her when your alert system goes off, the task of comforting her or providing whatever she needs is no longer yours, or Max’s, or Caine’s. Are we clear on that?”

There was a brief pause and then a rumbling grunt that sounded remarkably like, “‘Ballsy Prick.’”

Hudson figured that was the closest thing he was going to get to a ‘yes.’

But of course Gabe couldn’t just leave it at that.

“Dude, the way I see it, that’s fine by me if you’re the one she chooses to turn to. But you said ‘if’ twice just now. Not ‘when.’ So
if
you’re not planning on sticking around anyway, what you’re asking is a moot point. So it’s no skin off my balls.”

The line went dead immediately after, leaving Hudson to realize
that
was why his ‘if’s’ earlier had left a foul taste in his mouth.

* * * * *

AFTER LIA GAVE Caine two more reassurances that she was fine, which she echoed in her texts to Max, she rejoined Hudson on the couch.

It occurred to her as she sat down that he wasn’t giving her the ‘you-poor-dear’ look that most folks did when they found out about her parents’ murders. There was concern there, yes. But not pity. He’d been like that weeks back when she told him about Leo, too. He simply didn’t react the way everyone else in her life did when they learned the stories behind her emotional scars.

That made all the difference in the world.

“It was a pair of tweakers,” she said voice cracking a bit as it always did when she retold the story that never got easier to tell. “Two guys broke into our house high as a kite on meth, and paranoid to within an inch of their lives. We were in the kitchen making dinner when we heard them crashing into things in the living room.” She shook her head. “It was so weird. They weren’t even trying to be quiet. And before my dad could go investigate, they came rushing into the kitchen, bee-lining straight for my mom’s purse on the counter like they were taking money out of an ATM.”

She looked up. “You know, I’ve replayed the whole thing thousands of times in my head, but for some reason, while everything up until that point is clear and in real time, it’s like I have these glitches after that. Like scratches in a DVD where some parts are slow and faulty, while others are lightning fast. Not to mention the parts that my brain seems to skip over.”

Hudson nodded, understanding written all over his features. She imagined he knew better than most what she was talking about.

“No matter how much I try to rearrange the memory in my head, I always hear the gunshots after I see my parents on the ground.” She shut her eyes and took a deep breath, reeling a bit from having the memories assail her after years of remaining dormant. A part of her felt guilty over that dormancy, felt that the resulting blow to her gut was almost deserved.

“It’s all a bunch of jagged memories, fragments that don’t exactly fit like puzzle pieces. One second I saw the two guys, the next I saw my parents on the ground next to me, bleeding out.”

She had to work to keep her breathing controlled, calling forward the therapy techniques she hadn’t needed since high school. “When I looked up next, I saw the other guy—not the one that shot my parents—raise his gun and point it right at me. Meanwhile, his friend was peeling bills out of my dad’s wallet screaming at him to hurry up and finish it.”

She gave a bitter laugh.

“Can you believe that? The guy just shot both my parents and five seconds later, he was looking for a few fives and twenties.” She couldn’t stop that haunted sound in her voice, the one that sounded almost dead to her own ears.

Fitting. Seeing as how close she’d come to dying that night.

Seven inches to be exact.

“Cop sirens started blaring down the street. And then the first guy got hysterical. He ordered his friend to finish me off and go meet him in the car. And then it all happened so fast after that. I heard shouting outside. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t looking at the gun. I was looking at him. His panicked, glassy-eyed crazed expression.”

“And the very last thing I remember is hearing that shot. Glock 33—.357 Sig.”

Blood rushed into her ears in stereo with the memory. “It was like I went deaf after that. For hours. Until this young cop sat me down and started talking to me. Just talking. As if I could hear. And then the more he talked, I realized I
could
hear. The sounds rushing back in then at a deafening volume.”

Some nights, in her very worst nightmares, she could hear it all again. And she’d lie there imagining—no, not imagining—very nearly
feeling
that bullet hit her instead of hitting the cabinet beside her. And along with the impact to her brain, she felt the resulting, asinine feeling of…regret and more so
anger
. At herself. Because she’d shut her eyes when she’d seen his finger starting to pull that trigger. Because she hadn’t run. Or hid. Because she’d been frozen stiff, too scared to
move,
let alone fight back. To scream. To do
something.
Anything to save her own life.

In the end, it had been some tiny ounce of clarity amidst the meth-drugged haze that tweaker had been riding high on…some drop of humanity and far-too-belated sense of right and wrong that had made him veer his gun off to the side rather than kill her like his buddy had been shouting at him to do from the door. The buddy that had killed her parents in cold blood. All for a few more bucks to feed their addiction.

Afterward, folks told her over and over how lucky she was to still be alive. How the universe had intervened because she’d been destined to do greater things. And other similar nice-in-theory statements of grace, destiny, and the heroism in her paralysis at gunpoint. They all said a version of those statements. All except for Caine. Her oldest foster brother had been the cop who’d sat her down to talk that night.

He didn’t tell her she was lucky the tweaker hadn’t killed her. He didn’t tell her that her life was spared because she had angels watching out for her.

He told her she was a survivor. Not lucky. Not some bizarre winner of the universe’s twisted sense of Russian Roulette. Not some divine recipient of a death pardon. A survivor. But not because of what she’d been through, but because of what she was going to be overcoming from there on out.

The past was the past, he’d told her, staring at her not with pity, but with
conviction
. Whether or not she’d been able to fight back, and the fact that she’d been unable to save her parents…that was all in the past. And from that point on, it was her job to
survive
that past.

“Honestly,” she whispered against Hudson’s chest, “when he’d said that, I didn’t believe I could do it. And suddenly, not getting hit by the bullet had seemed like the easier feat.”

* * * * *

HUDSON SAT THERE on the couch, holding her in his arms long after the emotional exhaustion had hit her and pulled her into a dark sleep.

An hour now and no signs of nightmares.

Resilient thing.

He couldn’t say the same for himself. Just the thought of that bullet narrowly missing Lia was a terrifying punch to his throat each time he imagined it. He knew he’d be having nightmares about this in the weeks to come. Though he’d only just found her, already he couldn’t bear the idea of his life without her.

She was this scrappy little miracle curled up against his side as though she’d been made to fit him and him alone. No rational logic in the world could trump this feeling right here.

If Lia could slay her demons, so could he.

Picking up his phone, he texted Gabe:

>>> CHANGE ALL MY IF’S TO WHEN’S.

CHAPTER NINE

“SO WHERE EXACTLY are we going for dinner?” Lia looked out the window at the streets of Phoenix whizzing by. She couldn’t for the life of her think of any good restaurants in this area.

“It’s a surprise.” Hudson fiddled with the GPS on his phone and took another right turn, taking them further away from the main metropolitan district. “So tell me again about this auction you’re going to tomorrow. Is it going to be like today’s one?”

Lia smiled. Since Hudson had a rare four days off from the set while the entire cast and crew were focused on a segment of the movie that he wasn’t needed for, he accompanied her to a private auction to bid on several pieces in a rare estate collection on behalf of one of her clients. “No. Tomorrow’s one is for a museum who’s subcontracting me to authenticate and bid on a specific item. I don’t have nearly as much autonomy.”

“Still. If you’re bidding on it, then the auction folks are probably going to roll out the red carpet for you like today, right?” He winked. “I swear, I felt like I was walking into that auction house with antique arms royalty this morning the way everyone acted.”

“Oh stop it. That’s not true.”

“It is, and you need to stop downplaying it. The auctioneer practically pissed his pants on stage each time you started bidding on an item. And I don’t blame him. Each of the pieces you bid on ended up turning into the most rabid auctions with the highest sale price.”

“That doesn’t happen all that often, at least not when it comes to rare antique arms. Collectors are generally very particular. But at estate sales, sometimes the auction fever hits and if there’s buzz about a certain bidder—like the kind my competitors purposely got folks worked up about this morning—it can drive sales up, which means less for me to spend on other items.”