Love At Peace (Hometown Heartstrings #3)

Chapter 16

Roarke

I wasn’t sold on the layout of the dining room and that small bathroom, but the bare bones were there to work with. This house had potential, unlike the other places I saw last week. More than that, this house offered hope. It wasn’t derelict and falling apart, but not so updated that it would justify taking some portions down to the studs and making it my own.

If I wanted to expand the kitchen... I could push that wall in there...

Keeping my eyes narrowed, I tried to see the place with a blueprint perspective, guessing at this stage which walls would be load-bearing ones that I would have to work with.

“Or...” I mumbled out loud to myself, glad that the young, noob of a realtor was out on the back porch, on a call, instead of hovering over me in here as I looked and considered the possibilities.

“Or if I knocked out this one,” I whispered, stuck in this preliminary renovation mentality. I walked closer to the wall but stopped to look to my right when I noticed movement in my peripheral vision. “Hey, I’m—”

I shut up on the spot. Seeing Heather walking toward me silenced me.

It wasn’t the realtor, as I suspected it would be. He was the only other person here, since, according to him, no one else was biting at this property.

“Heather?” I asked as a greeting, stupidly.

Clearly it was her. She looked the same. Gorgeous and tense. Yet, I was surprised.

When we looked at this listing on my phone together, her intrigue about this house was hard to miss. But I couldn’t have counted on her to come see it.

What are you doing here?

“Hi.” Her neck strained as she swallowed. It was all the visual cues I needed to know she was very nervous.

“What’s up?” I asked, hating how lame it sounded. Since my talk with Gavin, I knew I needed to listen to his advice. I had to apologize to her. And, whenever I figured out how I could pull it off, I had to grovel, too. Because I hadn’t thought of a grand plan to accomplish those things after the busy week I’d had, I felt like she was catching me unprepared and off-guard.

“I was hoping to talk.”

I furrowed my brow, exaggerating my disbelief by pointing at myself then looking around, as if she could’ve been referring to someone else. “You want to talk to me?”

She rolled her eyes and looked aside. “Don’t be an ass...” she warned gently, as if she could take a joke but didn’t want to.

“The last I heard, you were done with me.”

She shoved her hands into the front pockets of her jeans. “I am.”

I narrowed my eyes, lost and hating how rapidly my hope deflated. The surprise of seeing her waned.

“I was,” she corrected.

“O...kay?” I shrugged. “What do you want, Heather?”

“I said. I want to talk. To, um, clear the air.”

Finally. Fucking finally! After all this time of wishing she’d want to confide in me, she was showing interest in doing it at last. No more wondering. No more begging for her to trust me and open up. No more waiting and dwelling and guessing and speculating.

She was taking the initiative to talk to me. To clear the air.

It seemed that I wouldn’t have to figure out a way to approach her. She was doing it now. She had taken this first step toward me, and I was overwhelmed with the relief that she was.

If she was seeking me out, that had to mean I still mattered to her.

If she was braving the tension to reach out to me and express the desire to chat, that had to signify she wasn’t happy with the way we’d left things between us.

“You do?” I asked, wanting to make sure.

She nodded, still not making eye contact as she moved her hands to her back pockets. “Yeah, I do.” Then she switched her hands back to the front pocket, fidgeting. “Or I feel like I need to.”

“No. No, no, no.” I shook my head, staying right where I was instead of walking up to her and hugging her. I was itching to hold her, to steady and comfort her with this obvious show of nervousness, but I wouldn’t. She’d told me too damn loudly and sternly that she was done with me that I now had to tread cautiously. “None of that. Do you want to talk to me?”

She lifted her face to frown at me.

“I don’t want you to feel like you’re forced to talk to me. I want you to want to talk to me.” To open up willingly.

She nodded. “Yeah. But maybe not...here.” Leaning to the side, she emphasized the return of the realtor, who walked in through the back door, phone still to his ear as he waved at us indifferently.

“Yeah. We can go outside.”

“Maybe somewhere less exposed than that,” she said, turning toward the front door.

“The bar? The diner? Café?” If she wanted to go somewhere more public, that was fine by me.

“How about my cabin? I’d prefer to have this conversation somewhere private.”

Because you’d feel safer there? I hated that she had ever gotten to this point of fear. “Whatever you want, Heather.”

At the door, she paused and glanced in the direction of the realtor. “Do you need to tell him that you’re leaving?”

I huffed. “Nah. Besides, I think I saw enough for this first look.”

“ First look?” she asked as we exited.

“Yeah.”

“You want a second look?” She went down the porch’s steps, tucking her coat around her tighter against the wind.

“Heather, don’t play games. You didn’t come find me to talk about houses, did you?”

She shook her head. “No. I didn’t. But I’d prefer that topic of the one I need to address with you any day.”

I let her words roll over in my mind as we got into our cars. She drove ahead of me, and the fifteen minutes it took to reach her cabin felt like they were four times as long. While I didn’t want to come across as too eager to finally hear her “clear the air” with me, I hated the sliver of hurt that I wanted her to soothe. It stung when she dismissed me. It pained my heart to hear her make it sound like she hadn’t valued any of the time we’d spent together.

But I didn’t need to lick my wounds. I could roll with the punches. This conversation wouldn’t be about me. And the second we were both in her cabin and seated facing each other at the high-top table, I fought back the memories of what else we’d done here.

“I left Chicago to get away from David. Hold on. I need to back up. I left Burton to go to Chicago for a job. I was excited to strike out on my own and start a new job at a marketing firm.”

I nodded, trying not to move too rashly or make too much noise as I took my coat off. She had the heat on higher than I did at the smaller cabin. As if my motions prompted her, she took her coat off too, perhaps suffering from tunnel vision with this need to talk to me that she didn’t stop to remove it when she walked in.

“I was excited to leave town because everyone judged me. My parents were mooches. Lowlife people who never should’ve been parents. They expected everything handed to them, counted on using any loophole possible out of any situation that didn’t favor them, and complained when others ‘wronged’ them. They took every opportunity to take charity, to demand retribution, and to skate through life without ever doing anything for themselves. That reputation rolled onto me, by association, and it was the start of why I wanted to be independent. To move away and have an identity from of them. And also why I never wanted to ask for help or consider taking help.”

I nodded. This was making sense, but it had to be only the tip of the iceberg.

“When I got to Chicago, I did a little sightseeing and such in my neighborhood before I would’ve started my job. That’s when David noticed me. He saw me at a restaurant near my building, and I think he probably overheard me talking to the waitress. Because the night before I was supposed to start my job, a ‘homeless’ man approached me, asking me for money. I had mixed feelings about people soliciting for money because my parents used to. They were too lazy to get a job, fully able to get jobs, but they didn’t want to. I was nervous and tried to get around the homeless man because I was scared. He was big and tall and looked drugged up. When he chased me, I thought that was it. I thought I was going to die and be raped. Before he could do much more than shove me against the wall, there was David. He came in, telling him to leave me alone. A knight in shining armor. My hero.”

She shook her head and glared at the table.

“He got the guy to go away and then insisted on seeing me home. Then he wanted to help me get checked out. And then he wanted to make sure that I felt safe. We were strangers, but with his act of being my hero on the streets, we became friends and then dated, and then...I was trapped before I knew it.”

“How?” So far, nothing sounded crazy. With the little she’d shared, David would’ve been a good guy.

“He staged it. He saw me, he wanted me, and he set it all up. The ‘homeless’ man was a friend of his, one I met a year later and he tried to gaslight me into thinking I was crazy and confused. He wanted to have a way into my life, and he did. Any time I wanted to set a boundary, he’d remind me of how I owed him. Because he ‘saved’ me when I arrived in town, I had to stay his girlfriend. Because he was such a great boyfriend, I had to live with him and not have my own place. Because he was the sole provider after he orchestrated me to be fired, I had to eat healthy and not get fat.

“He planned to control me—every aspect of my life—until I was trapped. The marketing job I was supposed to start? He contacted the owners and persuaded them that I was no longer interested. When he got me an administrative job at the legal firm he worked at? He manipulated every relationship I had with everyone there. Because I ‘owed’ him for when he ‘saved’ me from a false danger he set up, I was stuck. At first, he seemed too good to be true. He was doting and charming. Persuasive and generous. But every time he ‘gave’ me something, it was an obligation or expectation to pay him back, to stay, to do as he bade.”

“Fuck, Heather.” I ran my hand through my hair. This was terrible. I hated that this had happened to her.

“He got me fired so I would be at home all the time. He locked me into his apartment so I’d be there, waiting for him. When I pushed back and tried to leave, he found me and sedated me until I could remember that I had to obey and show my gratitude for him rescuing me. I tried to fight back, and he’d overpower me. I’d sneak out, and he’d have the cops patrol nearby and get me back.”

I stood, too upset about this to take it sitting down. Rage filled me, and I wanted to move. To vent. To react physically to let out even a little bit of the tension wracking my body with this news of how bad David was to her.

“I had no one and nothing to rely on to get away. I had no friends, just moving to the city. I had no coworkers to confide in because anything I said would get back to him. I tried to go to a women’s shelter and someone there tattled and he came to get me there. I ran in the middle of the night and begged a stranger on the street to let me borrow her phone, and they called the cops on me. Again”—she lifted her hand and let it fall—“he heard and came to get me. I had no resources to get out. I was cared for. He fed me, when he thought I wouldn’t get ‘fat’ and he provided the basics of shelter and water and whatnot, but it was always under his control. Anything I was deemed to need, he doled it out when he wanted to. All decisions about my life were for him to make.

“He didn’t beat me. Maybe a few slaps here and there, but he mostly just grabbed me and confined me. Drugged me to keep me acquiescing.”

“I’ll fucking kill him.”

She shook her head, then let it hang down. “You wouldn’t be able to get close. He’s paranoid and always scheming one step ahead. Always watching. He’s got connections and they never, ever fail. I only got out because I waited and planned. I had to find the keys to my car that was in storage, and then like a freaking fugitive, I got out and ran. The only place I could think of to go was here.”

But he followed you. “Did he know where you were from?”

“No. I never said. Then again, he could probably find out where from records. He had PIs on his payroll. I tried to hide anyway, getting a new phone and new cards. He took over all my bank accounts, all my savings, everything, so I wouldn’t have the resources to leave him. But when I planned to escape, I had cash for gas because I tried to start over with everything like that so I wouldn’t be traceable, but it wasn’t enough. I was hoping that getting away from him would be a sign that I was done. That he no longer had me captive and couldn’t control me. He wasn’t a beater, but he was vicious with mental abuse. A classic narcissist, but he took it too far. Like a stalker. An obsessed creep.” She sighed.

“Heather...” When I sat again, leaning forward to prompt her to look at me, she barely moved. Peeking at me, but keeping her chin down and her shoulders lowered in defeat, she drew in a steadying breath.

“And now he’s doing it again. I’ll explain a lot of this to Marty, too, but I needed you to know. He’s doing it all over again with Nevaeh. I don’t know what she might have told you—”

“Nothing. She won’t tell me anything but swears that he’s a good guy.”

She grunted a weak laugh. “See? He’s moving on to her and doing it all over again. He’s controlling her and swaying her. And with him getting her pregnant...” She rubbed her face. “He’ll never give up control over her now. His manipulation will never stop.”

Lowering my head, I braced my hands on either side and sighed.

“I couldn’t start thinking about leaving without saying something. I couldn’t leave in good faith without at least giving you a head’s up about this. Going to Marty won’t solve anything. I’ll still tell him about my past, but it won’t make a difference no matter what branch of law enforcement I contact. It doesn’t matter. That’s how many connections he has. But now that I see that he’s moving on to Nevaeh, I had to give you a warning, in case you can try to help her through this.”

I wasn’t sure I’d believe her on that fact. No one could be that immune from the law. Marty was a good cop, and Burton wasn’t within the same political, legal, or legislative sphere as Chicago was.

“I wanted to tell you about my past if I leave—”

I stood again, slowly so as not to spook her. She looked vulnerable after shedding the story of her past like that, and I didn’t want to give her any other reason to feel uncomfortable.

“If you leave?”

She pressed her lips together and furrowed her brow. “Yeah. Leave. If I take that job...”

If. For such a short word, it shot me up with a lot of hope. Before, when we’d last talked, she’d made it sound like she was leaving already.

“Please, can you reconsider?” I asked. Reaching out, I took a risk of holding her hand. “Don’t go.”

She stared down at our hands.

“Not yet.”

I refused to see her go.

She’d just told me about a man trying to control her. A narcissist who had controlled her, and he just proved how far he’d go to maintain that control even longer.

“I can’t stay near him,” she said quietly, as if she hated that fate.

I didn’t want her near him at all.

But if she left...

The worry for her would never stop.

“Please, don’t go, Heather. I’ll never stop worrying about you and—”

“ Me ?” She furrowed her brow and sat up. “You need to worry about Nevaeh.”

No.

I would never stop worrying about this troubled woman right here in front of me. And I didn’t plan to stop.