Infinite Possibilities

Chapter Three

I’m swimming in darkness when Liam’s promise surfaces in my mind. Everything is going to be okay. The words spiral through me and suddenly I can breathe again. I inhale air and then I am back on the porch of my family home, hidden in a dark corner with Luke, the sexy, blond god of an older boy next door, who I’ve crushed on since he moved in four years ago.

“You shouldn’t be out here,” I tell him and I am nervous on the dark porch, my brother’s warning about being cautious making me edgy for no reason. I’m here with Luke, my next door neighbor of many years. So what if I’d given him my virginity last night and it had left me feeling pretty lost? I’ve been lost a lot lately, confused by some weird vibe with my family I can’t escape.

“I had to see you before I left,” he says, pulling me close, brushing the hair from my eyes, and stepping on my bare toes.

“Ouch,” I groan.

“Sorry. Sorry, Lara. Did I hurt you?”

Obviously he hurt my foot, but I know he’s not talking about now. He’s talking about last night. “I’m fine. It’s...fine.” A perfect eighteenth birthday present, him pounding into me and then going drinking with the ‘boys’ after. I wish he wouldn’t have even come home for the summer. “And ah, you didn’t have to come by. I’ll see you at UT Austin in two weeks anyway.” I’m just not sure I want to now. “Unless you seniors are above us freshmen.”

“Did I seem like I was above freshmen last night?

He really isn’t going to like my answer to that. “It’s one in the morning. If my mom catches us, she’ll be furious.”

“She’s sleeping. You said so when I called.”

“I also told you not to come.”

“You’re upset with me.”

“No, I--” Tires grind on gravel behind me, and I jump, spinning around to watch a black sedan pulling into the driveway. Luke’s hand settles on my waist and he leans in to whisper, “Your mom got a little something something going on the side, or what?”

I grind my teeth, wondering how I never noticed what an asshole he was until last night. I open my mouth to tell him so, too, when the front door flies open. Luke yanks me back into the farthest, darkest part of the porch, and not a moment too soon. My mother appears and I’m shocked that she’s fully dressed in shorts and a tank top like me, when I’m certain I saw her in a white gown not an hour before.

Holding my breath, I watch as she pads down the stairs. her flat sandals slapping against the wood. The car pulls further up the driveway and disappears at the side of the house, and she follows it.

“I’m out of here, babe,” Luke says, but I barely register his words, tuning him out and rushing toward the steps. Luke catches up to me on the grass, grabbing my arm. “What are you doing?”

“I want to know who’s here.”

“Lara, be real. It’s the middle of the night and your dad and brother are out of town. Who do you think it is?”

Does he know? “Who? Who is it?”

“It’s a booty call.”

I gape at the crass comment. “Booty call? Is that what you hoped tonight would be for you? My mother is not cheating on my father.”

He snorts. “If you say so.”

I shove him. “Go back to Austin, Luke.” Moonlight washes over his shocked expression and I turn and head down the line of the house to squat beside a large row of neatly trimmed bushes.

Steeling myself for what could come next, telling myself whatever this is, is innocent, I peer down the driveway and suck in a breath. The car’s lights are dimmed now to a glow and my mother is standing at the open driver’s door. Yelling. She’s yelling at whoever is inside. She never yells. Except that day I came home to tell her I’d been accepted into the University of Texas, and overheard her fighting with someone.

“You told me it wouldn’t be like this,” she shouts, seemingly forgetting she might be overheard. She sounds too freaked out to think logically, out of her mind with emotion.

A deep, male voice says something, but I can’t catch the words. I think he’s being cautious about his voice carrying, though I can’t say why I think that. I just do.

“You said--” my mother starts, but the man pushes out of the car, turning her to press her against the trunk, his big, suit-clad body framing hers. My heart is racing and I want to call out for him to let her go, but I’m not sure I should. Shadows hug his profile, making it impossible for me to make out his face and he doesn’t seem familiar. He just seems like a monster.

“Don’t touch me!” my mother hisses, and the man leans in low to her ear and then pulls back to look at her.

I gasp as my mother slaps his face, the bite of her palm on his cheek clapping in the air.

He grabs her arm, moving her with him, and then yanks open the back door of the car. His back is to me and they exchange more incoherent words before I hear him clearly as he orders, “Get in.”

And she does. Oh God. Oh God. Why is she getting into the car? I stand up as he follows her into the backseat and shuts them inside. He’s going to hurt her and I think about calling the police or my father, but there isn’t time. I burst from behind the shrubs to help my mother, only to be yanked back behind the bushes.

“Don’t,” Luke warns,

I turn on him, grabbing his shirt. “Let go. I have to help her. I have to.”

“She doesn’t need help. She’s getting naked with that man.”

“She slapped him.”

“You didn’t hear his reply?”

“No. What are you talking about?” I jerk on my arm. “Let go. Let me go.”

“He promised her he’d fuck her until she apologizes.” He grimaces. “Just like last time.”

My throat goes dry. “No. No. That can’t be.”

“It is. Just stay here and I promise you she’s going to get out of that car looking well fucked and smiling like a well-fed cat.” He grabs my hand and pulls me around the house and I dig in my heels.

“Stop, Luke. Where are we going?”

“You aren’t watching this. It’s upsetting you.”

“I have to stay.”

“Just do what I say and it’s going to be okay.”

He starts pulling me away from the side of the house and I let him. I shouldn’t let him. I should do something. “Luke--” Blackness flashes in front of my eyes. I can’t see Luke. I can’t see the yard or my mother or who the man is. I have to turn back. I have to see who the man is. But I can’t. It’s too dark and Luke is pulling me. He keeps pulling me. No! No! No!

“No!” I jerk to a sitting position, gasping into flickering shadows, water pellets hitting a window, a storm all around me, and I yank the clip from the back of my throbbing head. “Where am I?”

“Easy, baby,” I hear, a moment before I’m pulled back into the cradle of a hard body and a car door behind me.

“Liam?” I whisper, unsure what is real, only that my cheeks are damp and there is a tangled mess of images in my mind. My mother fighting with the stranger. Liam and I fighting behind the diner.

“I’m here and you’re safe,” Liam assures me, swiping the dampness from my cheeks. “You blacked out for twenty damn minutes and scared the hell out of me. Is that normal? Do you always black out that long?”

“I...I don’t know. I think...I…maybe.” Nothing is normal. Nothing is right. My fingers ball around his shirt, and the murky dark waters of what remains of my flashback threaten to pull me under with guilt. “If I’d done something that night. If I...If I’d told someone-”

“What night? Told who what?”

I blink and snap my lips shut. What am I doing? What am I saying to Liam who I cannot dare trust? “Nothing,” I say and try to pull away from him.

His arm shackles my waist. “Talk to me, Amy. Let me help.”

My hand goes to his wrist where he holds me captive, the heat of his body radiating into me, arousing me, confusing me. I am alone without him, but I am tired of lies. From me. To me. About my life. “You shouldn’t have looked for me.”

“I should have found you sooner.”

“And that only makes me ask, why? Why Liam? There are so many ‘whys’ I have for you and you have yet to give me an answer that makes sense.”

His fingers lace into my hair. “Nothing about us made sense from the moment we met and yet it makes perfect sense.” And then his mouth comes down on mine, and I tell myself to fight him, but I don’t, I can’t. He is sweet bliss and burning passion that steals my breath in all the right ways. The taste of him, all hot spicy demand and primitive need, has my senses swimming and I try to think, but there is only what I feel. He molds me closer and somehow my hand is in his hair, spiking through those long, dark strands of sexiness I have missed touching. Just as I have missed him and this. My resistance is gone. I’m not sure I ever had any.

I sink into his kiss, twisting around to press my chest to his, burning alive in a way only he can make me burn, and he is heaven in the midst of hell. Every swipe of his tongue is liquid heat and an escape I can find nowhere else.

“I swear to you, woman,” Liam vows, tearing his mouth from mine, framing my face with his hands, “from this point on, I’m going to keep you naked and in bed with me where I know you’re safe.”

Emotion thickens my throat. “If only it were that simple. But it’s not. We both know it’s not. “

“It is. It will be. I’ll make it that simple.” He dips his head to kiss me again and I don’t fight him. I need just a few moments of escape, a tiny promise that there is hope for me and us, and for some kind of peace in my life. But as his lips graze mine, that peace is shattered all too easily by the simple sound of a cellphone ringing, radiating through the car from the front seat.

I go still, the realization ripping through me like a cold blast of ice. We are not alone. I start to pull away from Liam.

He holds onto me. “Wait. Amy--”

“Making me feel like a prisoner isn’t going to earn my trust, Liam.”

He curses and lets me go. I scramble away, twisting around to sit in the center of the back seat of the sedan, too much like the one in my flashback, rain pounding hard and fast on the rooftop, echoing my heartbeat. The long rows of lights and the open space tell me we’re headed for a small airfield of some sort.

“We’re almost there,” the driver is saying to the caller, and his short haircut and hard tone are a little too much like the military types I’d seen on some of my father’s security teams. Just like this car is a little too much like the one in my flashback.

Liam touches my arm and heat flashes up it, forcing me to withdraw to lean on the opposite door. “Who is he, Liam? And where are we going?”

“Someone who needs a lesson in silencing his ringer,” he grumbles, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “His name is Tellar Phelps. He handles security work for me when I need him.”

“Translation. You hired him to help find me.”

“And protect you.”

My fingers curl into my palms. “Strangers do not make me feel protected. They make me nervous. Where are we going?”

Tellar halts the car. “Nowhere if we don’t move now,” he informs us. “The weather’s getting dicey. We have air clearance that could change at any moment.”

I don’t look at him. “Where are we going, Liam?”

He pulls me to him. “We’re going to get the hell out of here before whoever paid to find you at that diner catches up to us.”

My throat goes dry. I’d forgotten this warning back at the diner. “Who?” I whisper. “Who else is trying to find me?”

“That’s a good question, Amy.”

“You don’t know?”

“No, but don’t think I haven’t been trying to find out.”

In that moment I am as tormented over Liam as ever. If he really doesn’t know, then he is trustworthy, but he’s also in danger because of me. I do not want him, or anyone else, hurt because of me. Not again. Not ever again. “Liam--”

Thunder clamors loudly, swallowing my words, and he grabs my hand. “Let’s get out of here while we still can do it safely.”

Safely. There is the key word in all of this. I don’t know if anything about being with Liam is ever safe for him or me, but I’m not sure being without him is either. Good intentions or not, I have no doubt Liam will force me onto this plane. I’m his captive. The willing part is still up for debate.

He opens the car door and I gasp at the shocking blast of cold rain that blows over us. “Sorry, baby,” he murmurs, nuzzling my cheek and lacing his fingers with mine. “Let’s get this over with.” And then, in typical Liam style, I’m being pulled outside and into the storm with him, leaving me no time to object.

Beside us, Tellar exits the vehicle as well, the rain whipping around him as he cuts around the car toward the trunk. Liam’s arm wraps around my shoulders and he tugs me close to his side, sheltering me as much as he can. Protecting me, I tell myself, as we rush toward what looks like a fairytale large jet plane that normal people can’t afford to charter. But then, Liam is no more normal than I am. I’m reminded that this similarity has often felt like the sparkle in a diamond otherwise too damaged to shine. It’s how we connected the dots of him to me and me to him. And as the water pours off of us, I cannot help but wonder which of us is truly pulling the other into the storm.

We reach the ladder and he urges me forward, up the steps. A pretty forty-something woman in a navy blue uniform and a badge greets me at the entryway and wraps me in a large towel. “Oh, you poor thing,” she says, directing me down the slim hallway to make room for Liam.

I step into a high-end fancy cabin that is far from commercial, with a large tan leather couch on one side and several luxury seats on the other. “Past the curtain,” Liam directs, handing me another towel the stewardess must have given him. “Buckle in. I’ll be right there.”

Liam turns away from me and I jump as the cabin door slams shut, grinding my teeth as I do. I’m tired of more than the lies that carve out every piece of my life. I’m tired of always being nervous and twitchy.

Turning, I find Liam’s back to me, one hand on a seat, Tellar sauntering down the hallway, towel drying what little hair he hasn’t buzzed away. I study him, expecting a pinch of recognition but finding none. And still I do not look away, and not because his wet t-shirt and jeans hug a long and leanly muscled body, or the fact that he has a handsomely carved face. No. What has my attention, what keeps me from looking away, is the jagged scar down his jawline that tells me he has lived through hell.

His gaze lifts abruptly and meets mine and I should feel like a dripping wet trapped rat. I should look away, hiding as I always hide. But I have changed these past few weeks. I am on a mission to take my life back and waiting tables in a greasy diner wasn’t about hiding. It was about preparing and planning. I am done with looking away and I hold his stare. And what I see in his is not anger, or intimidation, or malice. I see concern.

Liam must see it as well, because he turns to face me, water clinging to the loose strands of hair draped on his forehead that he sweeps away. “You okay?” he asks, moving toward me, his hands coming down on my shoulders. The engines roar to life but I do not move, captured by his stare, a mix of burning fire and freezing ice. Worry. Sincerity. Possessiveness. Like I am his to protect and no one will touch me. Not unless he decides to let them. And when I walked onto this plane, I made sure it’s his choice to make. He is in Total control.