Page 38 of Hideaway Whirlwind
“I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry,” Birdie murmurs, stroking Sydney’s back now that she clings to her mama as Birdie follows Goldie out the front door.
Davis claps me on the shoulder, and I shudder at his touch, lurching to the side. He drops his gaze to the floor and mumbles an apology, then heads into the hallway, knocking on the spare bedroom door while I stand numbly, watching my family be ripped away. How did it come to this? I should have been standing guard at the end of the driveway with my shotgun instead of feeling sorry for myself and falling asleep in the woods.
The blood is rushing too hot and fast through my head for me to hear what Davis is saying when Dustin eventually unlocks and opens the bedroom door. My boy bawls when Davis asks him to bring Rain to the living room and put him down beside Storm, since the puppies are too young to be on their own yet. Dustin squeezes Storm around the neck and tells her he loves her, and she tries to lick his tears away. Then he comes running and crashes into my legs.
Dustin absolutely undoes me when he says, “Don’t make me go, Papa!”
I squat and wrap my arms around him, my chest caving in. I want to sayit’s not my choice. I want you to stay forever.But that might only serve to turn him against his mama when Birdie is trying to do what’s best for her and the children, and I won’t do that to any of them. In fact, I can’t find the ability to sayanything at all when Birdie comes back inside and talks Dustin into finally letting go of me.
Davis reaches for Dustin’s hand, and I clutch my chest when another man leads my boy out of the cabin. I slide down to the floor and drop my head into my hands, trying to breathe through the onslaught of fatalistic thoughts too great for me to bear.
“Elliott?” Birdie whispers.
I look up through my tears to find her kneeling beside me. I curl my fist over my mouth and bite my knuckle to smother the sob that utterly wrecks me.
“Thank you for helping us. I’m sorry for…I’m just sorry.”
When she starts to stand, I selfishly, impulsively, reprehensibly pull her onto my lap and tip her chin up to steal a kiss, though she turns her head after the briefest connection. It’s not enough. I maul her, shoving my fingers into her hair to tilt her head to the side, sinking my teeth into the spot on her neck that I am compelled to bite, to claim, when we’re together.
After a few seconds, unbelievably, she arches her neck with a moan, moving to straddle my lap of her own volition, one palm on my cheek while she presses on the back of my head. “I’m sorry,” she manages to say before she moans again when I band my arm around her lower back, rubbing my nose up and down her skin, my chest heaving as I inhale her scent, murmuring her name over and over again. “I have to go.”
I shake my head, nipping at her small chin. “No, you don’t.”
She twists away when I try to steal another kiss. “I…I don’t want to,” she says in the barest of whispers. “That’s why I have to. Please tell me you understand.”
“No, Birdie, I don’t. Please don’t leave me,” I beg when she pushes against my shoulders and stands, taller now in herplatform combat boots.
“I’m sorry.”
“Please, please, stay with me,” I say to her back when she reaches the front door.
“Goodbye, Elliott,” she says quietly over her shoulder.
“Don’t leave me,” I say to the empty air after she walks out and closes the door behind her. “Please don’t leave,” I beg no one as the Explorer bounces down my driveway out of view. “Come back,” I whisper when I can no longer hear the crunch of gravel, and the sound of the running engine fades. “Come back.”
Chapter 18
Teagan
Davis and Marigold had taken the kids’ car seats from Elliott’s Bronco, and as I sit squeezed into the third row beside Dustin during the drive to their house, I don’t see the passing landscape—only Elliott’s grief-stricken face when he was forced to let go of each of my children. I don’t hear what Marigold says as she tries to be chipper for the kids—only the way Elliott begged me to stay with him.
I fell for him, a fifty-five-year-old convicted murderer, in only twelve days.We all did. That has to be some kind of rock-bottom trauma-bonding record. Which is why it’s even more important that I extricate us from Elliott’s life. Maybe with enough luck, it will only take twelve days to forget him. To forget about his skin flush with mine. His teeth on my neck and his beard rasping against my cheek. His steady, strong presence. The comfort and safety he brought to my kids. The ease I found in just being near him.The guilt that crushes my rib cage for making him believe I never truly wanted him.
“We’re here,” Marigold announces when Davis pulls down a long paved driveway to park behind an old red truck.
The kids don’t respond, and Sydney’s bottom lip still wobbles as we drag our feet to follow Davis and Marigold into the one-story, light-brown brick, ranch-style house set in the middle of a clearing just outside of their small town. With its wide, covered front porch, it’s nice, but it doesn’t feel likehomelike the cabin.
Marigold was heavily pregnant when I last saw her, but her red-headed son, Rowan, is all gummy smiles as soon as he sees his mom.
“Oh, thank god. I’m burning up,” the babysitter says, practically throwing the infant at Marigold so she can run outside in just her blue maternity tank top and wide-legged jeans. She stands with her arms stretched out at her sides, the wind whipping her shiny, curly brown hair around her shoulders. “Why do you have to keep your house so hot?” she asks over the hum of their gas generator, fanning her face.
“It’s sixty-three degrees in here, Layla,” Davis says, tucking a crochet afghan around his wife when she settles onto the brown leather couch in the living room to nurse Rowan beside her daughter, Lily, who is the same age as Kendall.
“Exactly! It’s hotter than heck.”
“Layla, as in Russell’s Layla?” I ask, lingering at the open door, rocking Kendall side to side when she lays her head on my shoulder, utterly spent of energy after fighting to break out of her car seat and crying for much of the drive.
“That would be me,” Layla says with a smile.
