Bent Not Broken (A Cedar Creek #1) (25 page)

He thrilled at the spark of disappointment he saw in her eyes. She wanted to be with him. He smiled.

“Don’t think I can make it until tonight without at least kissing you again, so I wanna see you at lunch.”

Her eyes melted and so did her body as she leaned against him.

Fuck yeah. She wanted to be with him.

Cal lay another hot wet one on her. “Now. I’ve got to get to work. I’ll pick you up at noon. You wanna go out or eat here?”

“Eat here,” she replied instantly, and enthusiastically. He wasn’t sure if she wanted to eat at her house because she had had enough of his PDA for one day or if she wanted to be alone with him. Either way, it didn’t matter, since he was getting what he wanted.

He chuckled and kissed her forehead before he let her go and moved slightly back. “All right, baby, I’ll see you at noon.”

*****

An hour later Cal’s phone rang. Looking at the display, he saw Bane’s name and answered immediately, hoping Bane had news for him ahead of schedule.

“Talk to me,” he demanded upon accepting the call.

“Cal. Got news. News you won’t like.” Bane warned him in a growly voice, indicating that he himself didn’t like the news one bit. Cal felt dread churning in his gut. “Give it to me.”

“You driving?” Bane asked.

“Yeah.”

“Pull over.”

“Just tell me, Bane.”

“Listen, Cal. You asking me to look into this woman, tells me you care about her. So I gather what I found out is not gonna make you happy, as in seriously not make you happy, as in you’re gonna lose your fucking shit. Don’t know the woman, but hearing what I heard today, I wanted to cave someone’s head in. Figure you care about her, you’re gonna wanna do worse and I’m not gonna be responsible for making your son an orphan ‘cause you go gonzo behind the wheel. So you want this information now, you pull over.”

“Fuck,” Cal muttered while he slowed down to pull into the parking lot of a convenience store. “All right. I’m parked.”

“Good. Now, I told you I’d need a week to look into things. But after what my preliminary search revealed, I decided to drop my other shit and started digging into this real fast.”

This was not a good start. Cal’s gut clenched. Bane was a reliable man, one of the best he knew. He prided himself on his reputation and his diligence and strong ethical code. For him to drop something he was working on to make his search into Ivey’s past a priority, something really fucked up must have happened. His feeling of dread multiplied as he clenched the steering wheel. Bane continued in a low voice.

“It’s bad, man. I have seen a lot in my career as a PI, but this makes my stomach churn. Her ex-boyfriend Kyle Parker is bad news. Has been picked up a few times during his teenage years for drunk and disorderly, been in a few fights. Nothing too major, stupid shit, always got bailed out by his parents. Then, ten years ago he got eight years for assault and battery and involuntary manslaughter when he beat Ivey. Slick piece of shit comes from money. Tried to buy his way out of his sentence, just like his daddy did when he was a teenager, but thank fuck the judge was a woman who didn’t feel like giving that abusing fucker a free pass. He beat her bad, Cal. Five broken ribs, broken wrist, eyes swollen shut, lip split open, whole body covered in bruises. I saw the pictures. Gave her statement, was in the hospital for a week, then left and surfaced again a few months later in Cedar Creek.”

Cal’s head was pounding, the absolute rage at what he had just heard threatening to overwhelm him. A red haze of fury blanketed his eyes. His knuckles had turned white at the force he was clenching the steering wheel with.

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Anguish mixed with rage.

Anguish for what his woman had had to endure.

“Fuck!” He burst out, relieving some of that pressure building inside of him, threatening to explode. Then he went over what Bane had said in his head and got stuck on one thing.

“You said he got eight years for assault and battery and involuntary manslaughter. Who did he kill?” Silence at the other end. Then, “She was pregnant when he beat her, Cal” No longer able to contain it the rage exploded inside of him, so fierce it was blinding his vision.

“Tell me you are shitting me,” he said in a voice so low and cold it was menacing.

“I wish I could, pal.”

“TELL ME YOU ARE FUCKING SHITTING ME!!” Cal roared.

This could not be true.

It did not happen to his Ivey.

His beautiful and precious Ivey.

“You are telling me, some asshole beat my woman while she was pregnant, put her in the hospital and made her lose her unborn child and all he got was eight fucking years in fucking prison while she packed her shit and all alone, drove halfway across the country to start a new life, locked herself up in her head so deep she suffers from panic attacks that witnessing them, they turn your stomach, torturing herself, not letting herself be the beauty that she is, afraid to get hurt again, scared shitless to trust anyone ever again?” Cal’s stomach was turning over as the immensity of what the woman he loved had endured at the hand of some asshole, who got off on beating women.

“I hear you, man.”

“I want you to find him. Hunt him down. Do whatever it takes. Then I’m gonna teach that motherfucker a lesson.” Bane had been right. He was ready to do more than just cave someone’s head in.

“I hear you, my friend, but you gotta think. I promise you I’ll find that asshole, but you gotta be smart about this. You’ve got a son and a woman you care about. What do you think is gonna happen when you teach him your lesson and he presses charges? You think he’s not gonna go after her? Go after Tommy? Let me deal with this.”

“Bane—” he could barely control his fury. It was eating at him.

“There is more,” Bane interrupted, “she took off less than a week after she was released from the hospital. Only went back to her apartment to get her things, had a social worker accompany her, then she stayed at a hotel for a few days. She didn’t stay with family or friends, just emptied all her accounts, bought a car and left.”

“Her mom died when she was in college and she isn’t close to her father,” Cal gave him the reason why she hadn’t stayed with family.

“It’s more than that, Cal. Her mom didn’t just die. She committed suicide. Sliced her wrists and thighs and bled out in the bathtub. Pulled her file. Looks like she was a very clumsy woman throughout her marriage. Lots of visits to the hospital. Fell down the stairs a lot, ran into stuff, tripped, cut herself on glass, the list goes on and on. Ivey’s file stated she had old hairline fractures, tons of them. Her arms, her wrists, her ribs, even her feet. There’s a reason she isn’t close to her father. That motherfucker beat both of them. Repeatedly.”

Fuck!

Could this get any worse? How much more could his woman take? It was a miracle she hadn’t ended up losing herself in alcohol or drugs and had turned out to be the strong and dorky and funny woman she was today.

Cal realized that that’s what she had meant last night. Her father had beaten her as a child. It had probably started with spankings. That’s why she was scared of trusting him, of feeling safe with him. The one man every child should be able to rely on for protection had betrayed her trust and had abused her repeatedly. Then another asshole she gave her trust to showed his true colours and beat the shit out of her, making her lose her unborn child.

Fuck! Now it all made sense.

Why she had such a hard time trusting men. ‘Cause she didn’t know how to, had never experienced someone accepting that trust and taking care of it.

Fucking hell!

“Has he ever been arrested for domestic violence?”

“Nobody ever pressed charges against him. Stellar mother, letting her own daughter swing,” Bane growled sarcastically. “The one thing I did find was her grandmother filing a complaint with family services when Ivey was thirteen, but that never led anywhere. No evidence to support her claims. Grandmother died eleven years ago, left everything to Ivey. Looks like she used part of that money to buy her house and pay the lease for her bookstore the first couple of months when she moved to Cedar Creek. Hasn’t touched it since.”

At least that was something. She had had a grandmother, who, by the sounds of it, cared about her and had made some effort to get her out of her parents’ house. But she had lost her.

His son had been right.

Ivey had nobody. No family to support her, to love her, to help her heal her wounds.

That was going to change.

He would make sure of it.

“Her dad still alive?”

“He is. Living his miserable excuse for a life alone it seems.” That was good. He deserved far worse than that, but at least there was nobody left he could unleash his physical abuse on.

He signed off with Bane, agreeing to let him come up with a plan of how to deal with Parker and her father. Then he got his shit together, and he did that by focusing his mind on how he was going to make life beautiful for Ivey from here on out, how much beauty Ivey was going to give him and his son, on how full of love and trust and laughter their lives would be once he had convinced her that’s what they were going to be.

And once he had dealt with the scumbag who put his filthy hands on her and tried to destroy her.

Chapter Seventeen

Light

Ivey

Shadows were always lurking in the back of my mind.

Constantly trying to ignore them, to push them away, so they wouldn’t interfere with my life, had become a habit, a part of me.

Most of the time I was successful.

Sometimes I failed.

And once they had clawed their way out of me, beating them back always left me drained.

But lately, there was something that helped me beat them back.

Something that at first I didn’t recognize, since I wasn’t familiar with it.

It was light.

Now, I don’t know if it was the light that Betty said lived within me.

Or if it was the fact that I was feeling lighter now, the heavy burden on my soul not quite as heavy since I opened up to Macy and Larry and talked about my past.

If it was me starting to let go of the shadows.

Or if it was me finding my way back to myself, trusting myself more each day to be me, the real me, who could be sassy and wasn’t afraid to throw attitude, who let her emotions show when other people were around instead of locking them away or dealing with them in the solitude of her lonely home.

Or if it was that little seed of hope that had started to blossom.

Hope that I could have my happily ever after after all.

Hope that beauty was out there for me.

The kind of beauty that I had found in the most unlikely of places. In a man who was unbelievably bossy, blunt to the point of being seriously rude, and who hauled me around to get my attention all the time. A man who could also be extremely gentle with me, caring, soothing, and who worried about my wellbeing and my state of mind. Who vowed to always keep me safe.

It could be any of those things.

It could be all of those things.

I didn’t know.

What I did know was that it felt good. That I wanted to keep hold of that feeling, of the lightness that made me believe I could soar without getting lost, because I felt like I now had an anchor that would keep me safe no matter what, that would reel me back in when the turbulences of life threatened to take over.

I just wasn’t quite sure how to do that.

I had never soared, had never known anyone who would let me soar, wanted me to soar as high as I could and give him the trust to take care of everything that was me, so I was uncertain I was capable of trusting that feeling.

The shadows were still lurking.

I just hoped that, however it came and wherever it came from, the light was strong enough to make them eventually leave me completely.

To finally set me free.

Chapter Eighteen

Realizations

Ivey

I was lying in bed completely spent. So much has happened in the past two days that not only my body was spent, but so was my mind. That didn’t stop it from whirling, though. In fact, I couldn’t get it to shut up. Thoughts of all that happened yesterday and last night and this morning and just an hour ago kept sifting through my brain, trying to find something, anything to convince myself that this wasn’t real, couldn’t possibly be real, and coming up empty.

Cal made true on his promise to come to my house for lunch. Though instead of eating lunch, we sated our hunger in a different way.

I had prepared soup and sandwiches for us and was setting the table when I heard a knock on my door. A very strong and firm knock.

I hurried to the door in excitement, knowing it had to be Cal. I had missed him, though I had only seen him a few hours ago. I looked through the peephole and saw that it was indeed Cal standing on my front porch. The door wasn’t open halfway before he pushed his way in, grabbed me by the waist, and pulled me into him with one arm, used the other to slam, then lock the door behind him, and slammed his mouth onto mine with such determination that it took me by surprise and all I could do was let him kiss me.