Kiss Me That Way: A Cottonbloom Novel (11 page)

Her gaze streaked up, and he noted the flash of consternation in her face. Had she just admitted to dressing up for him? His mouth dried. What was his play? Dating in Seattle usually included a fancy dinner and bed. A gentleman wouldn’t throw her over his shoulder and make straight for a bedroom. A gentleman would … walk her to her car?

“Guess I’ll be heading out then.” She backed toward the door. He stepped around her and held the screen door open for her. “You don’t have to—”

“I know, but I’m going to.”

They walked in silence. The oppressive heat of the day had given over to a cooling night. She slid into the driver’s seat of her SUV. He rocketed back in time, watching his laughing parents set off on their final date.

Before Monroe could close the door, he grabbed the steering wheel, his hand next to hers. “Will you text me when you get home?”

Surprise but also wariness came over her face. “I can take care of myself. I’m a black belt, if you’ll recall.”

He swallowed, not sure how to express the illogical need to know she was safe. He averted his gaze. A whip-poor-will sat a few branches up, his song haunting and full of loss. “It’s not that. I saw you in action. But … what if a deer ran in front of your SUV or you broke down or something?” There were probably a hundred other people she would call over him if she needed help. Maybe even Tarwater.

She feathered her hand over his and gave a quick squeeze before reaching for her purse. “Sure, I’ll text you. What’s your number?”

Once she was ready, he rattled off the number, thankful she hadn’t made him admit his fears aloud. The moonlight made her appear younger and more vulnerable, casting him back a decade. She cranked the engine. Still he didn’t step away.

“Night, Cade.”

His stay in Cottonbloom was temporary. He had no right to kiss her. Forcing his legs to move took Superman-like strength. “Good night, Monroe.”

Her taillights were swallowed by the darkness in the tree line at the edge of the road. He stood there staring into the night until his phone beeped.

Made it home. Anytime you need help with your nuts, give me a call.

The building worry crumbled like a sand castle in his wave of laughter. He had no idea if she was flirting or not, the uncertainty nerve-wracking and exhilarating at the same time. A million cockleburs tumbled in his stomach. The whip-poor-will called again, this time his song mocking.

Chapter Eight

Two nights later, Monroe lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling fan going round and round in an endless loop with no forward progress—mimicking her thoughts. Cade had canceled their last appointment with no real excuse. Tally had only shrugged and rolled her eyes when asked. Now Monroe had his number, she’d started about twenty different texts, each one sounding more adolescent than the last.

Every time their paths crossed, another door unlocked between them, the way becoming darker and more confusing. He was different from her adolescent memories, yet under the gruff, sometimes distant, façade he wore she recognized the man-boy who’d protected her that night and come to her so many times afterward.

His insistence that she check in with him had been driven by a deep fear. A fear he refused to admit, and compassion had softened her knee-jerk reaction. She didn’t need his protection anymore, but she could at least offer reassurance.

Her life seemed to hinge on that night, her trajectory forever changed. After that night she’d vowed never to depend on someone else—not even her mother. Especially not her mother.

Monroe had checked out self-defense videos from the library and taught herself Jackie Chan–style moves in the privacy of her bedroom. Even with the confidence they’d instilled, she’d slept with her door wedged shut whether a man was in the house or not.

After she and Regan had become roommates at college, Monroe had jammed a chair under the knob only once. Regan had been the picture of questioning surprise, and Monroe recognized how odd and irrational the habit had become. Still, it had taken a year before she’d slept soundly. Mastering jujitsu had added another layer of confidence and given her a new handle on her fears.

Her phone buzzed. Nerves spiraled from her stomach. She glanced at the screen, her hand trembling. Not Cade, but one of the girls from her program. Relief, disappointment, and worry collided.

“Hey, Kayla, what’s up?” She sat up.

“Mon-Monroe?” Behind the girl’s teary, shattered voice came the low buzz of voices and the occasional bark of laughter.

“What’s wrong? Where are you?” She stood and stared into the empty grate of her fireplace, her senses attuned to whatever was on the other side of the phone.

A sob cracked through the phone, the girl’s desperation and fear palpable.

“Everything is going to be fine.” Monroe’s words tripped over each other belying the mature calmness she was trying to project. She slipped on flip-flops and stumbled on the way out, banging her hip on the porch banister. “Tell me where you are. I’m coming to get you.”

“The Rivershack Tavern.” Kayla’s voice was barely a whisper.

The bar was a local gathering spot on the Louisiana side of Cottonbloom. Not seedy, but hardly high-class, it boasted dartboards, pool tables, and a bar stocked with ice-cold beer and mid-shelf liquor. But Kayla wasn’t even eighteen and shouldn’t have been allowed to step inside the bar.

“Are you with Dylan?”

Kayla had never been the most attentive or engaged girl in her program, but over the last month all she’d done was distract everyone else by gushing about her new boyfriend. Monroe hadn’t gotten the impression he was any older than Kayla.

“I’m scared.” She sounded close to collapse. “Oh, God, he saw me.”

The phone disconnected.

“Gosh darn it,” Monroe muttered at the blank screen.

She called Kayla back and squeezed the phone between her cheek and shoulder to start the SUV and throw it into reverse. The carefree, chipper voice asking her to leave a message was in stark contrast to that of the scared, tearful girl of seconds ago.

Monroe tossed her phone into the passenger seat and hit the gas. Every red light in town caught her, and she banged her fists on the steering wheel, muttering more colorful curses at each one. Her phone rang when she was two minutes from the bar, and she nearly bobbled it to the floorboard before answering.

“Are you okay? I’m almost there, sweetie. Hang on.”

“What the hell is going on?” A deep voice slid through her.

Considering his radio silence the last couple of days, the fact that Cade was calling seemed a figment of her imagination. She checked the screen to confirm. “Sorry, Cade, thought you were someone else.”

“Obviously. Who?” His voice bordered on angry. What right did he have to be angry with her?

“I don’t have time to talk. Kind of have a situation to handle.” She pulled into the Rivershack Tavern’s lot and parked on a section where the pavement had started to crumble into gravel.

“You have thirty seconds to tell me where you are and what’s going on.”

She chafed at the autocratic command. “The Rivershack Tavern. One of my girls needs me.”

She disconnected, jumped out of the SUV, and called Kayla. Voice mail again. The phone vibrated, and Cade’s name flashed on the screen. She ignored him, slipping the phone into her back pocket. He didn’t need a physical therapist to deal with a bruised ego.

A bouncer occupied a stool outside the door and scrolled through his phone. A cigarette defying gravity dangled from his bottom lip. He looked up as she approached, his gaze sliding down her body suggestively, making her wish she’d taken two minutes to change out of her black short shorts and scooped-neck red tank top into something that was less “Buy me a drink and you might get lucky” and more “Mess with me and I’ll kick your ass.”

He took a draw of the cigarette, the smoke still in his lungs when he asked, “Got your ID?”

The bouncer’s head looked like it sat directly on his shoulders, his short neck the same width as his head. The man must invest hours a day bodybuilding to achieve the bull-like shoulders and thick arms straining the T-shirt with the Rivershack Tavern’s emblem across the chest.

She glanced toward her SUV, seeing her purse on the side table in her foyer in her mind’s eye. She tried an ingratiating smile. “I’m nearly thirty and only here to pick up a friend of mine.” She took two steps toward the door, but he grabbed her wrist, his hand hammy and damp.

“Not without an ID, sweetheart.”

His use of the endearment wasn’t charming; it was denigrating. She twisted her arm out of his hand with ease. His jaw fell, the cigarette landing at her feet. She stamped it out with a twist of her foot.

“The friend I’m picking up is underage, has been drinking, and is somewhere in your establishment crying while you waste my time. Now, how did she get in if you’re so diligent about checking IDs?”

The man pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and chucked his head toward the door.

The room was awash in people. Men and women in factory uniforms mingled with those dressed in going-out kinds of clothes—sundresses and miniskirts for the women, nice jeans and golf shirts for the men. A smoky haze haloed the lights. Unlike on the Mississippi side of Cottonbloom, Sawyer hadn’t managed to get a smoking ban to pass, which had only increased business, drawing people from both sides of the river.

Monroe might have enjoyed the welcoming, eclectic vibe if she hadn’t crept into a dozen bars too much like this one to cajole her mother home. Sometimes she was a happy, compliant drunk. Sometimes she was a sad drunk, crying and huddled at a corner table. And occasionally she was a mad drunk, bitter at the hand she’d been dealt. Those nights had been the hardest.

Monroe was no longer the girl who felt inadequate to the task, and this bar wasn’t filled with strangers. She slipped through the crowd, scanning for Kayla. A hand wrapped around her upper arm and forced her to a stop.

Sam Landry. He held a cigarette and hard-liquor drink in the same hand. Judging by his flushed face, he was at least three drinks in, maybe more. “Hey there, pretty girl, don’t ever see you around the Rivershack. Your mama with you?”

Another set of worries tightened a vise around Monroe’s lungs. She broke his hold with an upward rap on his forearm, a simple technique. “Mother’s not hanging out at places like this anymore.”

“Is that what she’s been telling you?” He guffawed. “She’s still an attractive woman, and I never did get her out of my system. Now that Carla’s dumped me, I need someone to keep company with.”

“You are a pig.” She didn’t try to mask her disgust.

“Darlin’, she’s the one who was all over me last weekend wanting to rekindle things.”

While Sam might have been baiting Monroe, she feared more than a nugget of truth lay in his declarations. Should she have told her mother about that night so many years ago? Now it was too late.

“Leave her alone.” Her voice came out weaker, childlike, and she was frantic to shore up her defenses.

“Or what?” Hostility simmered on his face.

Confusion seeped through the cracks in her confidence. A couple of years after that September night, Sam had married and moved to Georgia. In his absence, she could almost pretend nothing had happened. But he was always waiting in her nightmares. When he’d moved back to Cottonbloom after his divorce and reopened his insurance office, old doubts had edged into her anger. Had she exaggerated the danger of the night in her memories?

The bar noise faded to nothing. Squatting in her memories, her terror of him reared up. “Or I’ll tell Mother—everyone—what happened that night.”

His expression flipped as if his face had two sides, like a coin. A nonchalant smile replaced the burning animosity, the change jarring. “What night? I have no idea what you’re talking about. You had the biggest crush on me. Do you remember?”

He either lied to add to her confusion or believed the lie. Did it matter? She wasn’t here to face her own screwed-up past; she had to find Kayla.

“I don’t have time to waste on you, old man.” She walked away and scanned the room. Every second that passed notched up her anxiety.

“You looking for a pretty, dark-haired girl? Young?”

Monroe spun on her toes. A man had swiveled around on his stool at the very corner of the dark, scarred bar top, a beer bottle hooked between his fingers. Corn-colored hair was pulled back into a low ponytail and a snake tattoo trailed out of the sleeve of his gray T-shirt and down one forearm. More colored ink peeked from his other sleeve. He was a stranger.

“Maybe.” Her tentativeness was born of mistrust. For all she knew, this could be Dylan. “Have you seen her?”

“She’s been in the bathroom for a while now. Seemed upset.”

Already on the move to the back corridor, she called over her shoulder, “Thanks.”

She bypassed a half-dozen women to get to the women’s restroom door. A middle-aged woman with smudged eyeliner and a too-tight T-shirt at the front of the line blocked her access to the door with an arm. “Hey, we all gotta go. No cutting.”

“I’m here to pick up my friend.” Monroe dropped her voice to incur some sympathy. “She’s had too much to drink.”

The wrinkles around the woman’s liner-smudged eyes smoothed. “I was wondering. Poor thing. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?” She waved Monroe into the cramped two-stall bathroom. Colorful graffiti decorated the walls and wooden stalls. A woman emerged from the right stall, so Monroe tapped lightly on the left.

“Kayla? It’s Monroe. Are you in there?”

The lock jangled and the stall door creaked open. Kayla’s eyes and nose were red, any makeup cried off. The girl pulled her shoulder-length dark hair forward and played with the ends. The motion only drew Monroe’s attention to Kayla’s left cheek.

Women moved behind Monroe, from the toilet to the sink, but she was focused only on Kayla. Very slowly, Monroe reached forward and tucked Kayla’s hair behind her ear revealing a nearly perfect red handprint on her cheek.

Fury, hot and wild, churned in Monroe’s belly, sending fire through her body. “Did he touch you anywhere else?” She whispered through clenched teeth.