Holding Out for a Hero (12 page)

He wondered if she’d think that if she knew the truth. “I’m no knight in shining armor, Ella. Don’t go putting me on a pedestal. I’m here to help Hanniford High win the Schools Cup. I’m not looking to be canonized.”

“You shouldn’t downplay this,” Ella chided. “You’ve really gone to bat for us. For Pete. For Cerberus. It’s a good thing you’re doing.”

Jake gave her a tight smile and drained his beer. She was looking at him like he was a god and he suddenly couldn’t stand the weight of his sins. Okay, yes, she’d had a cocktail or two but she was far from drunk. Ella had always been good—a good girl, a decent woman, a compassionate teacher—and he felt totally unworthy of her praise. He had to get away. His past sucked at him as a surge of anger and regret filled his chest.

He stood. “I think I better get back to the bar. Pete’s looking snowed under again. I’ll send over another round of drinks.”

Rosie raised her eyebrows as Jake hightailed it back to the bar. “Faster than a speeding bullet,” she murmured.

Ella watched him go, his Levi’s hugging his hips and his gorgeous ass, the broad planes of his back moulded to perfection in his snug black T-shirt. She frowned. What the hell was wrong with him? They were supposed to be celebrating.

And how was it possible to be annoyed and turned on all at the same time?

*

Jake worked the bar like a machine, grateful to be pulling beers and pouring shots and away from Ella’s big, blue, trustful eyes. He could smell hops and the floor was sticky from spilled liquor. People laughed, girls batted their eyelashes, men shook his hand, a metallic beat played in the background and the till opened regularly with a satisfying
bing
!

It was just the type of good, honest work he needed to keep his mind off the black mood that had settled on his shoulders. He was fighting a rather overwhelming desire to smash things. The feeling was familiar, a blast from his past, and he struggled to push it back. Roger Hillman and his mates getting steadily trashed in front of him didn’t help. But it had been a long time since he’d used his fists and he was damned if was going to regress on tonight of all nights.

He glanced up to see Ella and Simon laughing at something Rosie had said and he felt his gut twist tighter. What had she said to him a few weeks ago in her office? He was backward. He was Huntley and she’d come too far to go back. Maybe she was right. A few weeks in her company, a couple of hours with Rog buzzing around and he was spoiling for a fight.

Just like the bad old days.

*

An hour later, the group sitting at the booth were all feeling the hum from one too many cocktails.

“Jesus! This music is giving me a facial tic,” Rosie complained. “I’m gonna put something decent on, then we should dance.” She walked her fingers up Simon’s chest and smiled at him.

“Dance?”

Rosie rolled her eyes. “Yes, you know—moving your arms and legs to music.”

“Decent music,” Ella added.

“Hmm. Not something I excel at,” Simon said.

Rosie stared at him and shook her head. “What do I see in you again?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

She grinned. “Well, lucky you excel at other things.”

Simon smiled back and Ella felt like the proverbial third wheel. Simon may not be Rosie’s usual type but there was no denying they had chemistry. “Think I’ll get the music,” she said and climbed out of the booth.

Ella loaded the jukebox up with a selection of her favorites, effectively clearing the dance floor of all the bass junkies—which was pretty much everyone. Unperturbed, she and Rosie boogied until midnight, pulling out all the dance moves they’d perfected through their uni years and TGIF drinking sessions at this very establishment in its previous incarnation.

Simon couldn’t be coaxed out and watched them from the booth, laughing and shaking his head at their moves. Ella noticed Jake and Pete watching from the bar. While she was having a ball, she knew her moves were a little two-dimensional, and Rosie was the real mover, her body undulating to the beat as if it came from within her. Ella felt like she was in some kind of a corny chick flick. Very
Coyote Ugly
. She half expected Rosie to force her to climb up on the bar. Which, in this skirt, could be interesting.

The oh-so-familiar opening chords of “Sweet Home Alabama” oozed from the jukebox and the dance floor filled—apparently even metal-heads had taste.

“This one always gets them up,” Rosie said and grinned, undulating her hips and stomach.

“It’s a classic,” Ella agreed, doing a less successful version of Rosie’s effortless Beyoncé hip shimmy. “Metal may come and go but classics will live forever.”

“I’m getting Simon.” Rosie strode to the booth, tugging on Simon’s very reluctant hand. Ella laughed as she dragged him onto the floor. For someone who claimed he couldn’t dance, Simon got into the groove quite quickly. But then dancing with Rosie plastered to him didn’t actually require a lot of movement.

“Thought you said you couldn’t do this,” Rosie shouted.

Simon grinned as he pulled her hips in tighter. “This isn’t dancing. This is fornication to music.”

Rosie laughed. “I love how proper you make fornication sound.”

“Fornication.” Simon rolled the word off his tongue in a way that would have had old Mrs. Arbuthnot, his elocution teacher, calling for the smelling salts.

Rosie stood on her tippy toes. “See. You do know an F word.” And then she kissed him.

Simon indulged briefly before pulling away. “Let’s get out of here and I’ll show you how improper I can be.”

Ella rolled her eyes at the pair of them. The song came to an end and people started to depart. A hard male elbow jabbed Ella in the back and as she swung around, the man connected to the elbow stumbled against her, upending his beer all down her front.

“Hey mate, watch where you’re going,” Rosie snapped.

Ella stood looking down at herself as cold beer soaked into her shirt and bra.

“Simon, go and see if Jake’s got a towel or something.”

The man reached out to Ella. “Oh shit, sorry, lady, terribly sorry.”

Ella dodged the slightly inebriated man’s hands as they travelled toward her. What did he think he was going to be able to do? Rub her dry?

“Hey? Don’t I know you?”

Ella looked up from her drenched clothes and raised her head to look at the man properly. Oh crap! Roger bloody Hillman.

“I don’t think so,” she said giving Rosie a get-me-out-of-here glare.

“No, no. I do,” he said, grabbing her arm. “You’re Ella Lucas. Little Ella Lucas. From Huntley.”

She tried to pull out of his grasp. “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.” Her lips were so stiff they might as well have been pumped full of collagen.

Roger leered at her as he shook his head. “Some things I never forget. What do you say? Are you doing anything for the rest of the night?” He ran the back of his forefinger down her arm.

Ella’s skin crawled as the color drained from her face and her stomach plummeted to her toes. She felt cold all over; Roger Hillman may as well have thrown the icy beer in her face. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. She’d seen that leer before. Occasionally she had come face to face with one of Rachel’s men and they’d get that look. Their gazes frank, knowing. Like it wouldn’t be long before she was on the menu too. But she’d left that all behind in Huntley. Or so she thought.

Rosie watched Ella’s color change and her entire demeanor deflate before her eyes. It took her back twenty years and she felt all the old protective instincts roar to life. She prodded the upstart in the chest. “Hey pin-dick, fuck off,” she growled.

Pete was passing Simon a towel at the bar when all three men noticed the tense standoff happening on the dance floor. When Jake saw Roger Hillman with his smarmy paw on Ella’s arm, he practically vaulted over the bar.

“Whoa,” said Pete, who rapidly followed.

Simon quickly brought up the rear.

Ella looked down at Roger’s hand on her arm, not really seeing it for the hundreds of memories that clawed at her gut. His touch was making her skin crawl and his voice was slurred and creepy but she was afflicted with a strange sense of paralysis. She could smell the beer, warm and yeasty against her skin, and she could feel the stares of curious onlookers. She just couldn’t move.

“If you want to leave here with both your balls intact I suggest you let her go.”

Ella looked up as Jake’s voice sliced through her paralysis. He looked grim, his green eyes cold, reptilian almost. She’d seen that look before. Once. On the Huntley High School oval just before he’d taken a swing at some kid three years older than him who’d called Jake’s father a stupid drunk. She took advantage of Roger’s distraction and wrenched her arm free.

“Jake.” Roger smiled and clapped him on the back, not noticing Jake’s grim countenance. “Look who it is. Ella. Little Ella Lucas. You know,
Rachel’s
daughter.”

“Right,” Jake said and grabbed Roger by his lapels, hauling him closer. “Get out of my pub.”

“Hey,” Roger said, his feet barely touching the ground. “C’mon, Jake, you know what Rachel was like.”

Jake tightened his fists in Roger’s shirt. “Shut your face.”

“Alright, alright, you want her, you can have her.” He gave Jake a nudge in the ribs. “I bet she’s a goer though.”

Jake had been looking for a place to put his pent-up anger and Roger Hillman’s face was looking like the perfect spot. He could see a bright stain of color looking completely unnatural in Ella’s bloodless cheeks. Rosie had her arm wrapped tightly around Ella’s shoulders and a look on her face that would have put Mike Tyson to shame.

‘Help me,” Pete said to Simon before stepping forward between the two men. He grabbed Roger by one arm and Simon grabbed the other. “Out!” he demanded.

“I’m fine, Pete,” Jake growled.

“Sure, boss. But Ella’s not.’ He indicated with his head. “Leave this miserable piece of dog excrement to us and go take care of her.”

Ella looked at him with bewildered eyes. He hadn’t seen her this vulnerable, this confused since the day she’d ridden into Huntley and dragged him up to room seven. She looked pale and shaken and as much as he wanted to wipe Roger Hillman’s face all over the bar, pound on him, make him pay, make him hurt, he wanted to take her hurt away more.

He shoved Roger at Pete. “Don’t ever show your face in here again. Red-necks aren’t welcome in my bar.”

Pete and Simon hustled a loudly complaining Roger out the door and Jake unclenched his fists. He looked at Ella still being hugged fiercely by her warrior princess. “Go home, Rosie,” he said. “I’ll take care of her.”

Rosie nodded at the steely purpose in his gaze. “Make sure you do or you’ll have to answer to me.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Jake held out his hand to Ella. “Come on, I have some dry clothes in my office.”

She took his hand automatically and followed him like a docile lamb. He opened his office door, gesturing for her to go in first. She did and sat on his lounge chair, only vaguely aware of Jake moving around the office. Everything seemed to have shut down. Roger Hillman’s poisoned words still dripped their venom into her system, infecting every cell. They wounded her with their malice. They reverberated around her brain and she recoiled from them. From the ugliness of them.

“Put these on.”

Ella looked up to find Jake holding something out to her and it took a couple of moments for her to compute that it was clothes. The air con in Jake’s office turned her beer-impregnated T-shirt into a froze wet-wrap. She felt cold all over—not only from the air-con’s effect on her wet clothes—her nipples pebbled, her brain function was sluggish and she realised suddenly she was rubbing at the raised gooseflesh on her arms.

She reached out for the items, kicking off her shoes as she stood. She crossed her arms over her front, grabbed the hem of her T-shirt and hauled it over her head. She registered the surprise on Jake’s face on a purely subliminal level. Turning away from him hadn’t even entered her mind. It wasn’t like he’d never seen her in her bra before. She pulled his old training jersey over her head then stripped off her skirt and replaced it with grey sweat pants. She rolled them up several times at the ankle and sat again on his chair, huddling into the layers of the jersey.

“Roger Hillman is a dickhead. Always was, always will be.”

Ella nodded slowly, the pain not letting up but echoing around inside her. “I know. I just wasn’t expecting—it’d been such a great day.”

Jake gripped his glass. “Yes. It was a fantastic day.”

Ella stared at her fingernails, tuning into the muffled bass of the jukebox—even playing god-awful metal crap, it was oddly comforting. It was certainly preferable to the maelstrom throbbing inside her.

“Do you know how many years it’s been since a guy spoke to me like that?” she said finally. “Looked at me like that. Like I was a
commodity
?”

Jake cringed. “Ella.”

The impotency she’d been feeling started to ebb as pure mortification took over. How many people had heard his ugly inferences? Had Simon? Had Pete? What about the people on the dance floor around her who’d also been caught up in the whole sick incident?

“Nineteen. Nineteen blissful years. And that … that—” Ella searched around for an expletive worthy of Gypsy-Rose Forsythe’s best friend and failed. “
Moron
has the hide to throw my past in my face tonight? Of all nights?” She hugged her knees to her chest, rocking slightly.

“Forget about him,” he growled.

Ella shook her head. If only she could. But if living in Huntley had taught her one thing, it was that there was always another Roger Hillman. She’d just allowed distance to lull her into a false sense of security. She stood.

“How long, Jake? How many years does it take to shake her legacy? Until I get to be me. Plain old Ella Lucas, school teacher, and not Ella Lucas,
Rachel’s
daughter?”

Jake felt his heart break at her desolate question, at the bleakness in her eyes. He shook his head. Underneath it all, the fame and the accolades, wasn’t he still just Mick Prince’s son? The publican’s kid? Son of the town drunk, the loser gambler?