For Everly (12 page)

He took her elbow and pulled her over to the only quiet corner in the restaurant, down the small bathroom hallway. He still wore his leather coat, she realized. She resisted leaning forward to sniff it.

“Cole, I’m in the middle of my shift. I can’t just—”

“Your customers can damn well wait a couple of minutes,” he said as they stopped.

She frowned over the slight slur she detected in his speech. “You’ve been drinking.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not driving.”

He just stood there staring at her. His light brown eyes had predominantly green flecks, she noticed. There was a dangerous gleam in them, too. She felt pinned in the corner and suddenly wanted to escape.

“Cole, I’m not comfortable with this.”

“With what?”

“With whatever it is you’re doing right now.” She waved a hand to indicate the less than twelve inches separating them.

“What I’m trying to do is find out why you think I should trust you not to tell anyone about our arrangement when you haven’t been honest with me about your past.”

Her stomach clenched. “My past?”

“Yeah.” His body inched even closer. “How am I supposed to trust someone who was institutionalized?”

Now, she leaned against the wall for support. She couldn’t believe he was standing here discussing this with her right now. Her eyes shifted down the hallway. Anne caught her gaze from behind the server’s stand. She waved with her hands to indicate she’d do a fly-by of Everly’s tables. Everly could only nod.

“Won’t even face me, huh?” Cole said. “I should have known. You act like we’re friends, but you never talk about yourself. You must have figured it wouldn’t exactly earn my trust to know you’re not mentally stable. Tell me, do any of your other friends know?”

She tried to control her breathing. When she met his gaze, she flinched over the judgment she saw there.

“Oh, wait. Do you even have any friends other than my brother?” he continued in a mocking tone. The scent of whiskey blended with the leather of his jacket. “You never talk about any friends when we’re together…when you’re acting like my friend and making me think of approaching you as more than a friend. You never tell me anything about you. You didn’t even mention Aiden.”

Her head snapped back as though he had struck her.

“You have no right,” she said, her voice ragged as it worked to get past the blazing pain in her chest. “No right to come here and talk to me like this.”

“I have every right to be here, Everly. It’s a public place.” He leaned even closer. “And if you didn’t have anything to hide, you’d talk about it when a
friend
gives you the chance. What’s the problem? Is Aiden the reason you don’t have any friends? Does he smother you?”

She couldn’t catch her breath. She had to get away.

Had to escape.

Her eyes darted to the side door just a few feet away. It was all she could do not to shove away from Cole and out that door. But even as that instinct railed at her, she thought of her grandpa. If she walked out of this job, they’d have nothing.

“You’ve overstepped yourself,” she said. Her voice somehow sounded calm, though she wanted to scream at him. Her heart squeezed like an ache. “I understand that you no longer wish to work with me, and that’s perfectly fine. I quit.”

She pushed away from the wall and moved to walk past him. He reached out and grabbed her arm.

“Everly—”

Grasping his hand, she twisted it until he staggered to his knees with a yelp of pain.

“You’re right, Cole,” she said in the same level voice. “I don’t have any friends. But I have friendly neighbors, one of whom is a policewoman who teaches self-defense.”

She let him go. “Don’t ever come near me again.”

Then she grabbed the tray she had come for and went back to work.

*     *     *

The painful wounds that Cole ripped open hadn’t eased by the time Everly collected the payment from her last customers of the night. She’d seen him leave shortly after their confrontation, his gait unsteady. She hoped he hadn’t been lying about not driving.

Once she no longer had to focus on managing her tables, she had no choice but to dwell on their conversation. The memories that she kept so carefully buried now sat at the front of her mind, haunting her. She swept the wood floor beside the bar as other servers handled other side work nearby, but she was barely aware of what she was doing.

How had Cole found out about Aiden? About her hospitalization? Why had he been so cruel in confronting her?

“Well, it wasn’t a stellar Saturday night in the tip department, but I’ve had worse,” Anne said, interrupting her thoughts. “I should be able to spend the next ten days before Christmas making use of all this hard-earned cash.”

“Yeah,” Everly agreed.

“Hey, is everything all right?”

Catching Anne’s gaze, Everly forced a smile. “Sure. Just got a lot on my mind.”

“I hear you.” Anne finished emptying small bowls of bar snacks and collected the bowls in a stack to bring to the back for washing. “Was that Cole Parker I saw you with earlier?”

Everly nodded. She looked at the door leading out to the parking lot, wishing she was done with her tasks so she could get out of there.

“What’s going on there?” Anne asked in a low voice with a conspiratorial smile.

“Nothing. You know I work with his brother, Wyatt, right? So we sometimes talk if he happens to be in the restaurant.”

“Oh.” She made a face, then chuckled. “Well, that isn’t terribly exciting.”

“Not at all.” Everly gave her another smile to keep things more comfortable. Inside, she longed to escape.

Fortunately, it seemed that Anne was satisfied with that explanation. Everly finished her side work and gathered her things, bundling up in preparation for the wicked cold. Since it was late and the restaurant was located downtown, she waited until a few of the other servers were heading out and then walked out to her car with them.

She waved at them as she got behind the wheel of Champ. She turned the ignition and flipped the switch to get the heat started.

Then she burst into tears.

All of the emotion she’d been containing over the past couple of hours flooded out. She dug in her purse for her travel pack of tissues, but didn’t bother wiping her face until she was completely done. Then she took the time to clean her face enough that her grandpa probably wouldn’t notice that she’d been crying if he was still awake when she got home.

Finally, she shifted into reverse and backed up. There was a strange noise as she did so…a loud flapping sound. When she tried to turn the steering wheel, it fought her. Something wasn’t right.

Lovely. A perfect topper to this craptacular night.

She put Champ back into park and then got out. Although the parking lot was well lit, her nerves rattled over being the only person in it. The only other cars were closer to the restaurant. Looking around to make sure there wasn’t someone waiting in the shadows, she decided she was alone. Still, she felt like someone watched her as she looked down and saw that her rear tire was flat.

Yippee
, she thought.

Shaking her head over her miserable luck, she reached into the car and turned it off, grabbing the keys so she could unlock the trunk and get the spare. When she closed the door, she chanced to glance down at her front tire.

“What the hell?”

She walked around Champ, fear and anger rising with each passing moment. Once she had gotten all the way around the car, she looked around the parking lot again, holding her coat together at the throat.

All four of her tires had been slashed.

Chapter 15

Cole went to his favorite downtown nightclub after leaving Prix Fixe. He’d been avoiding going out since his accident, but what the hell. He wasn’t driving.

He wasn’t interested in being alone, either. Fortunately, some of his teammates were there. Marshall wasn’t one of them. In his alcohol-influenced mindset, Cole decided this was a good thing. He was likely to punch his friend.

Damn Rebecca, anyway.

He slowed down his drinking at the club, knowing there were probably at least five members of the paparazzi in the vicinity. The team had rules about the manner in which players conducted themselves while off the field. He wasn’t interested in paying a fine for getting in the news over public lewdness or drunken misconduct.

His teammates caught him up on the news in their lives and around the ball club. They discussed everything from trade rumors and changes in management to purchases of ridiculously overpriced vehicles. By unspoken agreement, they didn’t talk about women.

Many women approached the table, though. That was customary. A couple of the guys hit the dance floor a time or two, but they all mainly stuck to their corner booth.

Eventually, Cole had to go. He’d initially chartered the car for two hours and was only able to extend it another four because the driver had another fare to pick up after that. By the time he was in the back seat of the car and headed home, he had largely sobered up. His head hurt and his tongue felt swollen. He drank a bottle of water available in the car’s mini bar, but it didn’t help much.

To avoid thinking about the evening, he talked with the driver. The conversation was a lot of nonsense, but it kept his mind occupied. He planned to go from the car to his bed. No thinking.

But before he went to his room, he stopped in the kitchen for more water. He reached into the fridge and pulled out a bottle. When his gaze moved to the sink and the two champagne flutes sitting beside it, he thought of how shocked and pleased Everly had looked earlier that day when they toasted her success. He remembered how happy it made him to have produced that reaction in her.

Then he remembered her expression when he mentioned Aiden’s name. She looked like he had stabbed her in the chest.

Walking into the family room, he grabbed his iPad. He sat with it and his bottle of water at the island in the kitchen and did what he should have done before confronting Everly. He did a search for her name and the name Aiden.

It didn’t take long for him to find several news articles dated in early September eight years earlier. Pulling the first one up, he started to read.

“Marietta, GA – Tragedy greeted a north-Atlanta family yesterday when twenty-two year old Aiden Wallace shot and killed himself in his family’s home. The news shocked the close community, who knew Wallace as a talented pitcher with aspirations to enter the major leagues. Early reports indicate the recent Georgia Tech graduate suffered from depression after a season-ending injury his senior year resulted in him not being drafted…”

Cole pushed the iPad away from him. He felt sick. He rushed over to the sink and took deep breaths just in case.

Had Rebecca known all of this when she fed him the jealousy-inducing poison that he so easily ingested? She thought he and Everly were dating and suspected he’d jump to the conclusion that Aiden was a love interest of Everly’s. Sadly, even though he wasn’t dating Everly, that was exactly what he’d done.

Because he had started having feelings for her, he finally admitted. And Rebecca made him feel like a fool for doing so.

He thought again of Everly at the restaurant. He thought about how her face lit up when she saw him, then paled when he started hurling accusations at her. He could only imagine the pain he’d brought to her that evening.

Dear God, what had he done?

When his nausea settled, he forced himself to return to the island and his iPad. After what he’d said to Everly in his ignorance, he at least owed her the time and mettle it took to learn the facts about her past. He once again pulled up the articles and, beginning with the earliest one, he read all of them until as recent as he could find.

What he read would stick with him forever.

“Wallace was found by his fourteen-year-old sister, Everly, when she returned home from school…”

“Officials report that Aiden Wallace was still alive when his sister found him…”

“The siblings were reportedly very close, sharing the love of baseball…”

“…died in her arms…”

“…hospitalized for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder…”

The articles about Aiden’s suicide stopped about two weeks after they started. Cole found one dated two years later in August with Everly Wallace as a keyword, so he pulled it up.

“Atlanta, GA – The Society for the Prevention of Teen Suicide mourns the passing of one of its most committed Atlanta-area supporters, Victoria Stowe Wallace. Wallace (43) went into cardiac arrest in her Atlanta home yesterday morning. Her daughter, Everly (16), administered CPR and called 911, but Wallace died on the scene. Wallace was one of the top supporters of the SPTS following the suicide death of her own son, Aiden Wallace. She also supported the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), advocating for more services targeting young adults in their early twenties. Wallace is survived by her daughter and her husband, Mason Wallace, who was out of the country and unavailable for comment.”

Cole once again turned off his iPad. He stared into nothingness, trying to wrap his head around what he’d read and what he knew about Everly. Essentially, she’d led a pretty normal life until the age of fourteen. Then everything changed.

He rose and tossed his empty water bottle into the recycle container. His gaze once again touched on the champagne flutes before he headed to his bedroom.

He went to bed feeling like the lowest human being on the face of the earth. It was a long time before he fell asleep.

*     *     *

His cell phone buzzed on the nightstand, waking him at seven in the morning. Since he’d only been asleep for about four hours, he issued a string of curses as he reached for the phone and glared at the Caller ID with one bleary eye. Cursing again, he hit the answer button.

“What the hell, Wyatt?”

“No, I think the correct question is, ‘What the hell, Cole?’”

“It’s seven in the morning, for Christ’s sake.”

“Why isn’t Everly working with you anymore?”

Cole groaned. He needed a whole bucket of caffeine to deal with this so early in the morning. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, sitting up and rubbing a hand over his face to try and wake up. “I’m going to fix it.”