A Year of You (23 page)

“Maybe,” Em purred.

“Just tell him I got my own ride home,” Mattie replied. Em relayed the message, glee in her perky voice. Mattie hung up just as she heard West growl, “Shit!” in the background.

She slid the phone into her purse, numb from the last blow to her self-confidence. A person could only take so much. Even though she’d spent years conditioning herself to ignore anything that would bring her down, she could only bottle so much up. A second before her hand closed on the door handle, she heard a voice that froze her blood.

“Hey, baby, need a ride?”

She turned around and faced the man who’d killed West’s dogs. He drove the same white, windowless van. “No,” she said. Lightheaded from the sudden bolt of terror, she froze.

Her phone rang.
“Answer it,” the guy said cheerfully.
Without taking her eyes off the man, she fumbled around in her purse until her fingers closed on the phone. She pulled it out. K’s number scrolled across the display. Her heart dropped to her feet, and her blood ran cold. Clammy sweat soaked her underarms, her back.

“Hello?” she said quietly into the receiver. The van’s driver waved at the cabbie, and a second later the white car drove away. Mattie stared after the red taillights. “No,” she whispered.

“Hey, Matilyn,” K said cheerfully. “Get in the van with Logan.”

“No, K. I don’t want to.” The familiar, suffocating fear she’d felt most of her teen years descended on her again, turning her into a whining, trembling lump of flesh.

“Get in, Mattie. He’s waiting.”


“I don’t want him to hurt me.”


“If you get in and listen to him, he won’t. Not too bad, anyway.”


Crying, Mattie shook her head wordlessly. Logan stalked over and snatched the phone out of her hand. In the dying light she saw the dull black gleam of metal hidden under his clichéd black sports jacket. In her terrified state, Mattie didn’t hear the quiet things he said to K over the phone.

He snapped the flip phone closed and stuck it in his pocket. “You’re going to get in the van quietly, or I’m going to throw you in. If I have to do it the hard way, that boyfriend of yours is going to hurt tonight. Maybe even that pretty blonde sister of yours.”

Instinct spurred Mattie, and she took one lunging step toward the automatic doors. A nurse on the other side looked surprised.

Before the doors could hiss open, Logan grabbed her by the arm and snatched her back. “No!” she screamed, managing to tear one loud scream out of her throat.

Logan smacked her once across the face and hauled her toward the back of the van. Mattie fought him as hard as she could.

Just before he tossed her into the back of the van, at the feet of another man, her gaze met the nurse’s. The woman’s mouth was open in an ‘O’ of shock. One of her slim white hands was poised in front of her, palm out.

The back doors slammed shut, dumping Mattie into darkness.

Chapter Fifteen

After driving for a long time, Logan finally stopped the van. He crawled into the back and eyed Mattie. She clung to the back doors. The other guy hadn’t said a word or done anything except warn her to shut up a couple of times.

“K wants his money, Mattie,” Logan said.

“I don’t have it yet. I don’t know how much he thinks he’s getting, but it’s not much. It’s not worth all this!”

Logan laughed. “He knows about the trust funds, Mattie.”


“What trust funds?”
Logan smacked her again. The hot copper taste of blood flooded her mouth. Both of her lips stung stung.

“The ones to the tune of fifteen million from your grandparents and your mother, bitch. Don’t play stupid. You got a lot to lose here.”

Her phone rang. Logan checked the ID. “West? That your man? You know you’ve got K all worked up about him.”

Mattie’s mouth went dry. Logan hit the ‘reject call’ button, silencing the ring. Barely a minute had passed before it rang again.

Logan crawled to the back doors. The other man grabbed Mattie’s arms to keep her from bolting when the doors opened. After he’d cleared the bumper, Logan gestured for the other guy to follow. He pulled Mattie out into the night.

She recognized where they were. It was an industrial area between Daytona and Ormond Beach. Other than a few isolated buildings, there wasn’t much out here. Maybe half a mile up the road, traffic lights swayed in the breeze above an empty intersection. There was a convenience store on that corner, but it was so far away, no one there could hear her scream.

The nameless guy from the van spun her around so she faced Logan and hooked an arm around her throat while the other looped through her elbows and held her arms tight against his chest.

She knew what would happen. It had happened many times before. Logan was the first to hit her. Even though she tensed her abs, anticipating it, the blow to her gut knocked the wind out of her. She ended up on her knees, gasping, moaning.

Logan went down on one knee and grabbed her chin. He made her look at him. “K wants his money, Mattie. We’re just a warning. The next time, it ain’t going to be so pretty. Next time, K might let us have some real fun with you.” He laughed, a lecherous grin on his ugly face and tweaked her right breast, hard enough to hurt. The other man laughed, low and ugly. She sensed him standing behind her, too close.

She tensed, waiting for the next punch to land. Twice her nose had been broken by K’s goons. Two of her teeth were fake, and she couldn’t remember the number of times her ribs had been broken. Logan lashed out and smacked her hard across the face. The man behind her grabbed her shoulders and kept her from falling over. He caught her hands again so she couldn’t fend off the next few blows to her ribs and belly. Logan finished up with a hard, open-handed smack to the side of her head.

Dizzy from the pain and the blow to her head, she hunched over her knees, drooling bitter bile into the grass. She bit back her sobs. Crying only made things worse. She knew that from experience.

Logan grabbed her hair and yanked her upright. “You’ve got a month to get K’s money. He’s being generous. He knows exactly what’s in those accounts, and he wants every damn dime. Do whatever the fuck you have to do to get that money.”

He yanked a handful of hair out of her head for good measure. Before he walked away, he reared back and kicked her hip. The tip of his shoe struck like a battering ram, knocking her over and finally snatching a scream out of her mouth. She curled up in the thick grass and desperately sucked in air. She couldn’t catch her breath through the waves of agony ratcheting through her body.

“Car’s coming,” the other guy reported.

Logan dropped to his knees next to Mattie and rolled her on to her back.

This is it. He’s going to rape me.
She tried to curl back up, but he pushed her knees down and shoved his hand into her pockets. “For a rich chick, you don’t carry much cash.” He waved a five-dollar bill in her face before shoving it into his own pocket.

Her left hand was hidden under her body. Before he could flip her over to dig in her left pockets, she used the thick grass as leverage and slid her ring off. She hoped it was buried deep enough in the grass so that he wouldn’t find it.

“You have four weeks to get that money, bitch. Otherwise, there are some people that are going to get hurt. Do you understand?” He waited until she nodded. He told the other guy, “Let’s go.”

Mattie clenched her eyes shut and waited until the van started up and took off down the road, spinning sharp particles of gravel into her face.

When the sound of a passing car took the place of the grumble of the van’s engine, she allowed herself to give in to the pain. It carried her away faster than she expected.

***

Feeling old and hollow, West waited in the lobby of the nursing home for word on Mattie. The nurses kept offering him water, sodas, cookies, crackers, but he refused everything. He kept trying to call Mattie’s cell phone. It rang until the voicemail picked up.

The sweet recorded voice of his angel induced an agonizing pain so deep in his chest that he wasn’t sure he would make it.

For the millionth time, yet another sheriff’s deputy asked what time he’d last talked to Mattie.

“This morning,” he said. “We went to the bookstore, then had lunch, and she needed to come see her grandmother. We were supposed to meet here at five. I was late, and when I finally got here, ya’ll were here.”

“Has anybody threatened your wife?”

“Yes. Somebody broke into our house about a week and a half ago and tried to strangle her. I’ve told you all this before. Why aren’t you out looking for her?”

The deputy’s radio made a garbled sound. He turned away, listening to the dispatcher. After he replied, he turned back to West. “Good news, Mr. West. We found her.”

Ten minutes later, West nearly took out a couple of meandering deputies as he skidded to a stop on the side of the road behind half a dozen police cars and an ambulance.

“Mattie!” he yelled before he was even out of the truck. He ran for the ambulance. Sitting on the stretcher, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. The medic tending her let him bound up into the vehicle next to her.

“Good God, baby, what happened?”
She shook her head, refusing to look at him.

“You were with Emeline.”


“No, I was at her father’s. She was there.”


Mattie took a deep breath and winced. Her hand fluttered to her ribs. The medic poked his head in through the open side door. “Ma’am, we’d like to transport you to Ormond Memorial. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to have those ribs x-rayed.”

“No, I just want to go home,” she replied.


“No, you’re going to the hospital,” West said firmly.
She wasn’t getting out of this one. Her face was a livid watercolor splash of bruises, tearstains, and dirt. She breathed in short, shallow gasps, and her right arm hadn’t moved from its tight, protective brace against her ribs. She held a wad of gauze to her lips with her left hand. The medic lifted the back of the stretcher so it was inclined and helped Mattie lean back slowly. He strapped her down, just a belt across the waist.


Broken-hearted and hating himself, West leaned down and kissed her cool forehead

“I’m so sorry, baby,” he whispered. “Please, please, forgive me for not being here when you needed me.”

She shook her head. “If you had been, they’d have hurt you too.” She closed her eyes and refused to say more. The EMT and his partner hefted the stretcher up and pushed it into the back of ambulance. West stepped back so they could shut the door.

“I’ll be right behind you,” he said.

***

Mattie was too quiet for the next couple of days. West was her constant shadow, making sure she had everything she needed and lots of things she didn’t need.

She was killing him, inside. She didn’t talk to him, and she didn’t respond to his touch. “You were with Emeline,” he managed to get out of her. “I was kidnapped and beat up and robbed because you were hanging out with your ex-girlfriend.”

It was true, and it hurt like hell. “We were just talking, baby. I’d finished the work for McKendrick, and there was still some time before I had to pick you up at five.”

“Four.”


“Huh?”


“You were supposed to pick me up at four.”


West furrowed his brow, thinking. “No, we decided on five.”


“You dropped me off at three. Ruth Ellen’s lawyer called your phone at two-thirty and said to meet in half an hour. I told you I wasn’t going to be there for more than an hour, so we agreed on four.”

She broke down, weeping into her hands. West guided her to the dining room table and helped her sit. “I needed you so bad, West, but you weren’t there.”

“From now on, I will be. There won’t ever be another chance for anything like that to happen again.”


“It wasn’t just that. I can deal with that. I’ve been through things that would make God cry, West. I needed you because I needed to be with somebody who wanted me around for at least something.”

West sat down next to her on the uncomfortable couch and pulled her into his arms. She buried her face in his shoulder.

“Tell me what happened.”

“Ruth Ellen let me know in no uncertain terms that I’d been a mistake. Karen couldn’t have cared less about me. Nobody wanted me. Ruth Ellen asked me to come back, but she only—” She cut herself off abruptly and shook her head.

West hugged her tight, rocking her like she was a child. “That’s not true. She spent every moment she was able searching.” None of that was true. Karen went a little crazy after Elaine vanished. The entire family went into a tailspin. He still couldn’t bring himself to refer to Mattie as Elaine, even though there wasn’t any way a stranger would be this distraught. Ruth Ellen wouldn’t have ever told a complete stranger as much as she’d told Mattie, if she wasn’t convinced Mattie was Elaine.

McKendrick had even stopped fighting it and referred to Mattie as Elaine.

Mattie cried into his shoulder, radiating such a deep, profound pain that West had to blink away his own tears. She turned so she was facing him, straddling him, and buried her face in his shoulder once more.

He rubbed her back, holding her tight.

I can’t let this woman go.
In a little over a month, the three-month-period would be up, and she would disappear again. “No,” he whispered into her hair, savoring the scent of her tears and shampoo.

Her body against his was so hot. She clung to him, her damp face touching his neck. One of her hands coiled in his hair, and the other rested on his shoulder. In her despair she was vulnerable, open, and he wanted to taste her pain. Drawing her face up, he kissed her deeply, mindful of injured lips. He tasted the saltiness of her agony, the bitterness of her tears. The rough line of stitches touched his lips. He kissed the other side of her mouth, gently.

The tears that tracked down her cheeks dampened his lips as he kissed them away. Her hands entwined tightly in his hair.

“Mattie, I want you,” he whispered into her ear as he bit her earlobe hard enough to elicit a soft gasp. She didn’t pull away. “I want you in more ways then one, baby. Nothing that Ruth Ellen said matters, okay?”