Mine to Keep (3 page)

“Why don’t you two go and watch some television? Your mum and I will clear away the mess.” They were alone. The sound of the television could be heard.

“Thank you,” she said.

“They’re good kids.”

“They’ve never been like that. Steven wouldn’t go near them. He always shouted and sent them to their room. They’re young, and I can’t believe I wasn’t strong enough to leave when I should have.” The tears she tried to keep down, rose up and spilt down her cheeks. She couldn’t believe she was spoiling such a beautiful moment. Gabriel made her feel at home, and here she was ruining it by crying about stuff she couldn’t control.

“Hey. No more tears.” He wrapped his arms around her, comforting her, but his voice commanded her to stop. She hugged him tight. His warmth and strength provided a safety net she hadn’t felt for a long time. Gabriel made her feel safe. She listened to what he said, and the tears slowed down until they ceased.

“I’m happy. I can’t believe how long it has been since I’ve felt like this. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt like this. When I’m with you, I feel happy.” She closed her eyes and pressed her head to his chest. He stroked her hair, and the heat of him surrounded her making her feel like all of her fears could disappear.

She glanced up into his eyes. Her heart raced as her body was flooded with heat. The intensity of his gaze had her immobile. Underneath her hands, she felt the strength and couldn’t help but tighten her hold. He leaned down and instead of pulling away from him, Amy leaned up. One kiss wouldn’t hurt. She knew it was only an hour ago when she’d asked for him to wait, but she wanted to know what it felt like. The only lips she’d kissed had been Steven’s.

Gabriel pressed his lips against hers, and the current that passed between them startled her. He moved her back until she was pressed against the wall. The only sound she could hear was her own heavy breathing. He was older than she, but no matter how many times she tried, she couldn’t find a reason not to be with him. The people of CapeFalls already hated her. Their opinion didn’t matter. For once in her life she wanted to make a decision that suited her for a change. Gabriel was the only man who’d made her feel like she could be someone and do something with her life. She refused to back down. Her mind was filled with nothing but him. He moved the hair off her neck and tilted her head back. She stared up into his blue eyes and lost all sense of reasoning.

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Gabriel stared down into her eyes and felt himself sink. She was too young for a man like him. He’d seen death and caused a great deal of pain.

“Kiss me,” she said. He couldn’t refuse her. They way he felt for her was wrong.

“Don’t ask this of me.”

“Please. Just once I want to know what it’s like to kiss someone without being afraid. I’ve spent most of my life being afraid.”

He thought about her ex, and his anger came back in full force. Amy deserved love, tenderness, and time. He could only imagine what her asshole husband had given her. Every woman should have at least one good experience with a man. He wanted Amy more than he liked, but he would take any excuse he could to be near her.

“Close your eyes,” he said. She did as he asked, and he stared at her lips. The need inside him to take her and make her his was strong. Instead, he brushed his lips across hers. She didn’t respond to him at first. Slowly, so he wouldn’t scare her, he made love to her lips until she began to kiss him back. Her response to him was clumsy, and he knew in that moment her inexperience would be a pleasure to enjoy. If she gave herself to him, he could show her the many different ways to pleasure her body. She gripped the hair at the back of his neck as he pressed against her, deepening the kiss. Her moans made his cock thicken, and he thrust his hips against her.

She gasped, and he used her vulnerability to his advantage. He pushed his tongue between her lips and forced her head back to receive him. She moved with him, her body attuned to his.

Gabriel tasted her sweetness on his tongue. He was addicted to her in every way. He couldn’t begin to describe how he felt. Never in his life had a woman left him so shocked by the emotion Amy filled him with.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said, kissing down her cheek to her neck.

“I’m not beautiful.”

“Yes. You are. Feel that.” Gabriel pressed his pelvis to her stomach. The rigid length of his arousal would be hard for her to miss. “I’m hard for you. I don’t understand what you’re doing to me. I know I want you.”

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” she said with a moan.

“Why? We both want to.” He glanced down her body and saw her nipples pushing against the fabric of her shirt.

“No. I’m a mother with no husband who has an entire town hating her.” Gabriel stared into her brown eyes and saw the pain. She was always feeling pain. He hated seeing it and wanted to rid all memory of her pain from her mind.

“I don’t hate you.”

She whimpered, and she cupped his face. “This is so hard. I’ve never felt this way with anyone.”

Gabriel placed his hands over hers. “I’m sorry. Your kids seem settled for the night. I’ve got a spare room. Stay here, and then I’ll take you back home tomorrow.”

“And risk more gossip?”

“They already have issues with you, Amy. I don’t think it matters what you do or don’t do. They’re going to hate you.”

She nodded her head. “I’ll stay for tonight. I can’t get home without you driving anyway.”

Gabriel pulled away from her with reluctance. He wanted her in his arms. When she was there he knew he could protect her. They cleaned up the kitchen and went into the living room to finish watching some television with the children. He settled on the far side of the couch with Mia resting her head in his lap. Amy sat on the other. He glanced her way several times and noted her shirt sleeve had ridden up. The round red dots of cigarette burns glared back at him. She’d left the bastard for over a year, and the scars from the burns would stay with her for some time. Eventually, the scars would fade, but unless he did something she would remain Steven’s wife for the rest of her life. She wouldn’t let anyone inside. He knew the pain of trusting someone. Trust didn’t come easily to him. Staring at her arm and thinking about her response, Gabriel came up with a solution. She needed to realise she was a woman. His feelings for her were not weakening like he hoped they would. His feelings were only getting stronger. He sipped at his beer, watching the television.

At some point, Amy left to put the children to bed. Gabriel had told her to put them in the room at the end of the hall. In a spell of inspiration, he’d decorated the room in order for her children to have a place to stay. He didn’t want to tell her that he’d decorated the bedroom with the intention of her children staying with him.

He waited for her downstairs thinking about how far she’d come since he’d met her. No longer did she cower away from people in the street or turn the other way. She held a conversation without looking to bail at a moment’s notice.

Amy was a strong woman, and he needed her to see the strength inside her. Whether she’d gotten over what Steven did to her because of the kids or for some other reason, the fact was, she’d gotten over it. He knew there were times she hurt, but that was to be expected. Gabriel knew he would never abandon her. He cared about her too much to let her go. In his heart, he knew he wanted Amy to be his. For her, he could be a better man.

Putting the beer down, he went to see how she was doing. He wanted to help her wherever he could. His feelings for her were not something he took lightly. He knew how he felt, and it scared him with its intensity.

Mine.

She walked out of the bedroom door leaving it ajar. “I want to be able to hear them,” she said with a smile. Her smile made him want to fall to his knees and beg her to be his.

He nodded and followed her down the stairs, the kiss they’d shared playing in his mind.

Mine.

That one word kept whispering through his mind like a mantra. Amy wasn’t a thing for him to possess. She was a person to make her own choices.

For a forty-five year old man, he was behaving like an adolescent.

“Amy,” he said. She stopped and turned around. “When you said you wanted to feel what it was like to be kissed without being afraid, did you mean anything else?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Have there been other things that you’ve only experienced fear?” He’d read her file and knew the type of man her husband was.

Amy didn’t know how to respond to him. How did you tell the man you had intense feelings for that there was nothing about your marriage that you hadn’t been afraid of? Steven got off on the fear he instilled in others. When would she be rid of that bastard? He’d controlled her while he’d been married to her, and he was controlling her from prison.

“You don’t want to know the answer.”

“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t want to know.”

She licked her lips and stared past his shoulder while thinking about her life with Steven. From the moment they had started dating to when Gabriel had carried her out of hell, she’d been afraid of Steven. “There was never a moment when I wasn’t afraid. He dominated every part of me.” Why hadn’t she seen what her life had become?

“Why did you marry him?”

“I got pregnant and didn’t have a choice. I was seventeen, scared, and my parents organised everything.”

“Did you ever love him?”

She sucked in her lips and shook her head. “No, I never loved him. I couldn’t stand his guts.” Amy broke down allowing the tears and her pain to fall away. She went to her knees, but Gabriel caught her and carried her to the couch in his sitting room. The television was playing to itself, and she let go. For six years she’d been living a nightmare. Six years of being under a man who did nothing but scare her.

“Have you ever talked about it with anyone?” he asked.

“Who is there to talk to? Most of CapeFalls doesn’t believe me, and I’ve spent most of my life thinking I should just live with it.”

“I don’t think like that.”

“You’re the only person I know who believed me. In CapeFalls, there seems to be this old written rule that we stick together as a town. What I don’t get is when I first told someone, I was laughed at. My mother told me that what a man does with his wife is his own business, and CapeFalls says to stay out of other people’s business or something like that. I think our precious little town needs to rethink the rules.” She rubbed the tears from her eyes even though more fell afterwards. “I sometimes relive that night in my head, over and over again. I don’t know what would have happened if Billy hadn’t known how to dial your number.”

He rubbed her arm and lifted her legs over his lap. They were so close, and she wanted to do nothing more than bury her head against his chest and forget about her life before she met him.

“Why don’t you tell me about him? Tell me about your life and what led you to marrying him and not throwing his ass in jail.”

She stared into his eyes. The magnetic blue always managed to soothe her. He was hard but gentle with her. Anna had offered to be her sounding board, but Amy had been afraid to talk to anyone about her time with Steven. Gabriel was different. He didn’t judge her or look down on her. In his own way, he cared about her.

“My parents liked him. Whatever I did in high school or anything, they never approved. I was always disappointing them, and then Steven came knocking on the door. He was a nerd but nice to me. At least in the beginning he was.”

“He was trying to impress your parents?” he asked.

“I don’t know. We went on a few dates at my parents’ insistence. We became a couple. Once you’re seen with the same person more than once, you’re a guaranteed couple. That’s what I mean about staying here. People will think we’re a couple, now.”

“We’ll deal with that when it comes.”

She liked that he didn’t appear disgusted. “He took me to the movies one night. It was one of those movies where you sit in the car. I was bored and wanted to go home. We had sex in the back of the car. He kept kissing me, and one thing led to another and bam. Virginity gone.” She remembered the pain of that night. He hadn’t been gentle. She’d tried to stop him, but in the end she’d let it happen.

“Did you want to be with him that night?” Gabriel asked. The tears fell harder than ever. No one had ever asked what she’d wanted. They always expected her to want everything that had come to her. The kids and Steven.

“No.” She sobbed the word out. For six years she’d kept her thoughts to herself. Six years where she gave herself to a man she couldn’t stand.

“Let it out.” He held her close as she let loose all of her emotions she’d kept bottled up for years. The pain and heartache from her predicament.

After some time, she managed to calm down. Her head hurt from the constant crying. Gabriel passed her a tissue, which she was grateful for.

“What happened next?” he asked.

“I got pregnant. He told my parents he wanted to marry me. Two months later I was Mrs. Grant, and I knew I had twins on the way. His parents moved us into a home, and he got a job. Everything was going fine.”

“You weren’t happy?”

“I was doing what everyone expected of me.” She looked down at her clasped hands. Her left hand no longer had the small gold band on her finger. How many times had she looked down at that gold band in the six years she’d been married and felt trapped? Too many to count. She remembered the fights and the pain from his fist along with the constant waiting for him to go to sleep so she could clean up the mess he’d created.

“Were you happy?” he asked.

“No.”

“Do you love your kids?”

She gasped, her hand covering her mouth. “Of course. They were the only thing good to come from my life with Steven. I would give me whole life for them.”

“You’d be surprised the number of women who’d wish otherwise.”

“No. Not me. I hated my life with Steven but never with them. Seeing their faces in the morning is what helped to get by.”

“When was the first time he hit you?”

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