Sweet Dreams by Kristen Ashley
He was settling the covers over us when he repeated, “Like I said, come to bed.”
“You don’t want me here,” I advised.
He ignored my comment and asked, “What woke you up?”
“Sorry?”
“Why do you wake up?”
“Stuff drifts through my brain, wakes me up.”
“What?”
“Lots of stuff.”
“What was it tonight?”
Good God, I couldn’t tell him that.
“Just… I want Dad to be okay. I was pretty incommunicado while I was roaming, sorting through my head, needing to be alone and find what I was looking for. I knew Mom and him and Caroline were worried. Really worried. I’d reconnected lately but the last time I talked to Dad was via e-mail,” I lied. “I want to hear his voice.” This was not a lie
He honed into exactly what most concerned me.
“You aren’t responsible for your father’s heart attack, babe.”
“And you aren’t responsible for Tonia’s death, babe.”
That shut him up.
We were face to face but his face was shadowed, only his shoulder and arm that was on top of the covers were visible in the lights coming from windows.
“Go back to sleep, Tate, I’ll be okay,” I whispered.
He ignored me again. “What keeps you up?”
“What keeps me up?”
“Yeah, if shit sifts through your brain waking you up, what keeps you up?”
“It keeps sifting through my brain.”
“You can’t shut it down?”
“No.”
He fell silent.
“Tate,” I said, “I’ve tried everything. Sleep aids. Counting sheep. Relaxation techniques. Nothing works but I’m used to it.”
“The mind’s a powerful thing.”
“Yes,” I said softly.
“Your Dad’s gonna be okay, Ace.”
“I hope so,” I whispered.
We both fell silent and this lasted awhile.
Then, quietly, just in case he fell back to sleep, I said, “Everything you did today was nice.”
“Babe,” he muttered.
“Did I wake you again?”
“No.”
Well thank goodness for that.
I kept talking. “Thank you for coming all the way out here with me.”
“It’s just a day.”
“Still,” I said, “you didn’t have to do it.”
“State you were in, you’d end up in Alaska.”
That startled a giggle out of me.
Then I protested, “I would not.”
“Babe, seriously, you were a robot without any programming.”
I had to admit I kind of was.
“Told you Dad was the strong one,” I reminded him.
He had no response.
“I’ll pay you back for the tickets,” I whispered.
“We’ll talk about it later.”
I ignored him this time. “Yours too.”
“Lauren, we’ll talk about it later.”
“They had to cost a whack.”
“You speak English, you just don’t hear it,” he stated.
“All right, we’ll talk about it later,” I yielded.
We fell silent again. This lasted a long time, so long, I heard Tate’s breathing go even and I knew from experience with listening to Brad sleep he was out.
I rolled to my other side and the instant I did, Tate’s arm came out and hooked me at the waist, pulling me back into his body.
“Tate?” I called, super quiet.
“Mm?” he replied.
“You asleep?” I was still being quiet.
“No,” he replied.
If he wasn’t asleep then why did he pull me into him?
“Um…” I mumbled.
“Your hair smells good.”
“It does?”
“Yeah.”
Wow. He thought my hair smelled good. That was nice.
I decided to ignore that and how nice it was.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” I asked.
“’Cause I got a woman in bed with me who won’t shut up,” he answered.
“Oh,” I whispered then pointed out, “I was quiet awhile ago.”
“This is true,” he murmured.
“So why aren’t you asleep?”
He was silent.
“Tate?”
He sighed then he said, “You smell good, babe.”
“I do?”
“You feel good too.”
Uh-oh.
“Tate –”
“Just be quiet, Lauren.”
I decided to go with that.
“Okay,” I whispered.
We were both quiet a long time and I was about to fall back asleep in the curve of his arm with his warm body at my back when he called my name.
“Laurie?”
“Yes,” I muttered, my voice sleepy.
“I was pissed last night.”
“I know.”
“You look good.”
“Sorry?”
“No way you can look like all the rest.”
My eyes shot open.
His arm curled me deeper into his body and I felt his face burrow into my hair.
“You’d always shine through,” he muttered and now he sounded sleepy but I was again wide awake. “Somethin’ special,” he finished.
Oh.
My.
God.
He fell asleep moments later, I knew this when I took his weight into my back, his breath evened and his strong arm curved deeper around me in a way that I’d never be able to slide out from under it, I’d never be able to move away. I’d have to stay right there, tucked tight to Tate.
I didn’t sleep for a long time but I didn’t care. I just laid there thinking if Brad had held me like this all those years, maybe I wouldn’t have tossed and turned and driven him nuts. Maybe I would have been perfectly fine with my insomnia.
If Brad had held me like this, every night, I’d look forward to it.
Chapter Nine
Damn Baby
The phone rang and my eyes opened.
I was in Tate and my hotel room, alone in our bed.
I knew I was alone (even though the bed was huge) because I couldn’t feel him, hear him or sense him. In fact, I couldn’t sense him anywhere, the shower wasn’t running, he was gone.
I turned toward Tate’s side where the phone was and saw the note. I sat up, grabbed the receiver and the note, putting the receiver to my ear as the words on the note registered in my brain.
Ace,
Running. Be back.
Man of few words.
“Hello?” I said into the phone.
“Hi hon,” Mom said back.
“Hi Mom.”
“I wake you?”
“That’s all right.”
“You sleep okay?”
“Not really, you?”
“No,” she replied. “Listen, hon, we’re meeting for breakfast then going over. Mack says he’ll come back and get you if –”
I looked at the clock. It was six thirty. I knew two things from this. Mom didn’t sleep a wink and Tate was a seriously early riser.
“Tate’s running but I’ll be down,” I told her.
“He’s running?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“In a town he doesn’t know?”
“Um, he’s a bounty hunter, he gets around,” I guessed. “New places don’t faze him,” I guessed again. “He’ll be okay.” That wasn’t a guess. I figured Tate could run through the fires of hell and emerge unscathed.
“We’ll wait until he gets back. They aren’t letting us in for long visits and visiting hours don’t start until ten,” Mom told me. “I already called the hospital and they say his status hasn’t changed but it’s…”
She stopped and I listened to her breathing heavily, trying to control emotion.
“Take your time, Momma,” I w
I listened to her inhale then she said, “They said it’s good he made it through the night.”
Darn but this sucked.
“That’s good,” I said softly.
“Yeah,” she replied.
“I’ll get a shower in, go down and leave Tate a note. He’s going back to Carnal today anyway, maybe his flight is early and he’ll need to skip breakfast and get a taxi.”
“He’s going back today?” Mom asked, sounding surprised.
“Um… yes.”
“Why?”
“Well…”
“He should stay, at least a day, see the farm.”
“He’s got things to do,” I told her.
“It’s just a day,” she replied.
I’d heard that before.
“Listen, Mom –”
“I’ll talk to him,” she decided.
“No! Mom, really –”
“At a time like this, you need him with you. He’ll understand.”
“But…” I searched desperately for something then stated, “He’s got fugitives from justice to hunt down. It isn’t like his job isn’t important.”
I didn’t like lying to my mother. It was likely Tate would go home and help out at the bar and get pissed about doing it all because Bubba liked to fish. Still, maybe there’d be some fugitive Tate had to go round up.
“There’s lots of bounty hunters, Laurie, there’s even one on TV. He can delegate,” she said like Tate worked in an office with a bunch of bounty hunters who got a call then said, “I’ll go,” or “You go,” or “No, you go,” or “Butch is up next, he’ll go.”
“Mom –”
“We’ll talk at breakfast.”
“Mom –” I repeated but there was a knock at the door and my eyes fell to Tate’s nightstand. I saw his cell, wallet and the Marriott keycard so I figured Tate went out without the keycard and he needed me to let him in. “Listen, there’s a knock at the door, Tate’s back. I’ll talk to him. If he has to go home then he has to go home.”
“Maybe, if he has to go home, he’ll come back,” she suggested hopefully.
There it was. My Mom thinking my life could begin again now that I found a man. Then again, she’d married my Dad when he was twenty-one, she was nineteen. She’d never known a life without a good man in it so she would think that.
Another knock came at the door, this one louder. Tate was getting impatient or perhaps thought he needed to wake me.
“I’ve got to go,” I said to Mom. “See you at breakfast.”
“Yes, say eight, or whenever you’re ready,” Mom replied. “I just want to get there before visiting hours. See if we can talk to the doctors.”
“Okay,” I threw off the covers and swung my legs off the bed. “See you at eight. Love you.”
“Love you too, Laurie, and glad you’re here.”
“Me too.”
“Glad Tate’s here too.”
I sighed.
“Me too.”
“Bye hon.”
I stood up and bent over the phone saying, “Bye Momma.”
I hung up and rushed across the room to the door.
Not looking because it could be no one but Tate, I pulled it open while talking, “You forgot the –”
I stopped talking because Brad stood there.
I couldn’t believe my eyes so all I could do was stand there and stare, which was a bad thing. It was bad because Brad took that opportunity to move into the room and he might not have been as big as Tate but he was bigger than me and I had no choice but to move back with him and I did, walking backwards staring up at him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked when we stopped.
“I saw him running,” he told me.
“Tate?”
“I knew you’d be alone.”
Oh for goodness sake.
I heaved a sigh then said, “Brad –”
“We need to talk, without him here.”
“No we don’t.”
He looked at me from top to toe then smiled his killer Bradford Whitaker smile. “You look great, darling.”
I was just awake, my Dad was in ICU and I was not in the mood for Bradford Whitaker’s killer smile or to contemplate the fact that it had, for the first time since I’d seen it, not even the slightest effect on me. Instead, I focused on forcing myself not to roll my eyes.
I hated it when he called me darling and just then I remembered that I hated it even before he screwed me over. He was from Indiana too. We’d moved to Phoenix for his work. People in Indiana didn’t call people “darling”. They might call them “darlin’” but not with the “g”. I always thought that was totally fake. Even people in Phoenix didn’t say that. He wasn’t an English lord of the manor for goodness sakes, even though he wanted to be or, at least, acted like he was.
Thinking this moved me to thinking about Phoenix, a place I liked, it had great shopping and excellent restaurants and out of this world Mexican food. It was also close to Sedona and Flagstaff, both of which were amazing. And the desert in bloom was not to be believed. But, even so, I never settled there. It was too hot. I never got used to the heat. I hated the summers, they were torture.
Brad loved it. He detested cold and adored golf. No matter how often I talked to him about it, he never even entertained the idea of moving anywhere else, not even when his work offered jobs in DC (where I really wanted to live, it was beautiful, historical and exciting) and Seattle (where I’d been before and I thought it was great, so much so that was the first place I headed after I left my old life – but it didn’t hit me like Carnal did when I got there, too big, too wet, so I didn’t stay).
Thinking these things made me straighten my spine, look Brad in the eye and say, “Please go.”
He didn’t go. He got close and put his hands to my waist.
“You look great tan, always did.”
I put my hands to his and tried to remove them, repeating, “Go.”
His hands slid around to my back. “And your hair… I like it like that, sun-streaked.”
“It’s fake Brad. It isn’t sun streaks. It’s highlights delivered from a plastic brush wielded by Dominic, the gay stylist to all biker babes.” I was still pushing at his hands.
He put pressure on my back so our hips touched. “Whatever,” he muttered then went on. “The length of it suits you. I wouldn’t normally say a woman of your age should have long hair –”
“Brad!” I snapped, interrupting him because he was annoying me in a variety of ways. “Go!”
He ignored me, leaned a bit back without letting me go as I still struggled with my hands now at his wrists behind my back trying to push them away. “How much weight have you lost?”
“I don’t know. Who cares? Let me go.” I pushed harder.
He pulled me closer.
“What you were wearing yesterday,” he murmured and I tried to remember what I was wearing yesterday. It was another tank top, this one salmon, ribbed and fitted, with jeans and a belt and flip flops. Not exactly haute couture but even I knew they fit really well. “God, Ree.” That came out as almost a groan. I noticed his eyes were locked on my mouth, I knew what that meant and I belatedly realized the situation was quickly deteriorating.
I jerked back but his arms only got tighter.
“Brad! Let! Go!”
His eyes came back to mine. “We were good together.”
I stopped struggling and glared at him. “Yeah, we were. Then we weren’t.”
His head bent and he shoved his face in my neck. “I missed you,” he whispered against my skin.
I started struggling again, squirming against his body but his arms only wrapped tighter around me and I felt his lips slide up to my ear.
“She cheated on me,” he whispered and I went still.
“Sorry?” I asked.
His head came up. “Hayley. Traded up for a new model.”
Oh my God.
He continued. “I made more money than Sco
I didn’t know what to make of this, though I’d always suspected Hayley was with Brad because Scott, her husband, wasn’t as successful as Brad, my house was bigger than hers and she could only afford Griselle to come once every two weeks, not once a week. I also knew by things she said she wanted more. I didn’t want to think ill of my best friend so I’d let her little comments slide, dozens of times, but they always made me feel weird.
Now, I knew.
I had the inappropriate desire to giggle.
Instead, I started, “Brad –”
“She’s been fucking him for two years. Even while we were going through what we went through, Hayley knowing I was doing it for her, she was working her next move. He finally left his wife for her. Hayley’s gone, Ree. Been gone awhile. Turned her back on me, Audrey, Janet, Colleen, all of them. She hasn’t spoken to them in ages… or me. She’s on hospital charity committees now. Thinks she’s high-brow. Hobnobbing with society.”
Well that explained the e-mails. Now they all knew just exactly what Hayley was. All of them. Even Brad.
That desire to giggle got harder to bite back.
“This isn’t my problem,” I reminded him.
“Honey –”
“Brad, let me go, it isn’t my problem,” I repeated.
He pulled me even closer and his face dipped down. “I’m here because you were right. We can work on this. We can go back to what we had.”
I started struggling again. “No we can’t.”
“We were good together once. Then you started to let yourself go…”
I jerked back but not successfully out of his arms and my eyes narrowed on him. “I started to let myself go?”
“You know I don’t like a woman to carry extra weight,” he explained.
He could not be believed!
“I started eating because I sensed you were fucking around on me!” I shouted.
“Darling –”
“Stop calling me that!”