Better Than You (The Walker Family Series Book 3) (28 page)

“Put me down,” she hissed.

He held her tight and gave her a little shake, hard enough to pull her gaze to his face. “No,” he told her. She was breathing hard, her chest pushing against his, and he realized he was gulping in air too. “No, you’re not doing this.”

Her nails bit through the wet fabric of his shirt as she pushed and strained away from him. Her dress was smudged with mud in places, transferred from him, and tears were threatening to spill over her lashes. She wasn’t Delta anymore, but a riled feral cat, terrified and unreasonable. “You can’t force me to do anything,” she said and it was almost a wail. She bared her teeth at him, fighting against his arms
. “I don’t care how big you are.” Her voice broke and the tears came. “You can’t do this to me again!”

Her meaning slammed into him hard, struck the breath from his lungs. She wasn’t trying to hurt him, wasn’t flinging barbs. She really thought…

A lump formed in his throat. “No,” he said, just a murmur this time. “No, baby, I’m not – ”

He felt the sharp bite of claws raking down his cheek before he saw her hand move. She struck him hard, fingers flexed, nails gouging into his face. It stung – he felt the flesh tear – but it was the sheer shock, and not the pain, that caused his arms to go limp.

Delta lunged away from him and bolted, a swirl of dark hair and midnight skirt before the door slammed and he was alone. He stood a long, stupid moment, blinking, listening to rain pelt the window, the silent room pressing in on him. He reached up and touched his face, felt the slickness of blood, drew his hand back and saw it crimson on his fingertips. Saw, too, how badly he was shaking.

**

Delta didn’t know how long she lay curled on her side on top of the covers, the room black around her, the sound of rain against the window just louder than the shallow rhythm of her breathing. It felt like forever before the lock clicked and the door swept in, a panel of warm light falling across the wall.

“
Delt?” she heard Regina, and then the lamps came on. The door shut. “Honey.”

She wondered, for a moment, what she would say if she rolled over and faced her friend. When she realized she didn’t have the words, she closed her eyes and feigned sleep. She heard Regina come around the bed and look at her, heard the sigh, and the retreating footsteps. Perfectly still, she listened to Regina shower and ready for bed, slide beneath the covers and then the lamps went out.

Maybe
, she thought, and felt the deranged urge to laugh,
if I stay like this, I’ll wake in the morning and it’ll all have been a dream.

But she couldn’t sleep, and she couldn’t stop shaking, and she couldn’t stop replaying it all in her mind. She didn’t kno
w why the lamps came back on or why her bed dipped as Regina sat beside her, didn’t understand the hand that rubbed circles across her back. Until, finally, she realized she was sobbing.

36.

A
ll the next day it rained. The white sweeps of satin, the bundles of tulle, the ribbons and cut flowers, the lanterns, the red carpet…all of the finery took on water until it was as gray and muddied as the churning surface of the lake. There was no wedding. The castle didn’t notice. But Mike watched the breeze unwind a long, once-white silk ribbon from around the bole of a tree until it clung by just an end, lifting and diving in the rain. He let his forehead rest against the cool dampness of the window and looked all the way across the lawn, toward the lake and the place where he was supposed to be married.

He stayed in his room. Walt and Jordie and Dad all came by to sit on the side of the bed with him and offer wisdom – which was none. Tam had found an earlier flight back to Dublin – no doubt he’d maxed out his credit card doing it.

His mom was the female to finally brave the door. It must not have been latched because she didn’t knock, but came in unasked. Mike knew it was her before she came and took the honorary place of advisor beside him on the bed; the smell of her perfume was something ingrained in his memory – in all the Walker children’s memories – and even if he’d dreaded it as a teenager, hiding smokes and porn mags under his bed, there was a comforting familiarity about it now.

Beth tended to be fretful – not flighty, just stressed – and because of that, Mike forgot, for long stretches, that under her deep breaths and exclamations, she was a matriarch too. When they needed her, or when she thought they needed her, she became this steadfast rock focused solely on her children. It didn’t matter that he could have picke
d her up in one hand these days; he felt very small as she settled next to him and fixed his profile with one of those penetrating mother looks.

She reached up and he felt her fingernails against his scalp as she petted his hair like she still did with all of them. “I’m so sorry, baby
.”

He’d expected his family to be all-smiles to learn that Delta wasn’t, in fact, going to become a Walker. The honesty in her voice stung. He’d been pushing them all away and… “You sure about that?” he asked with a humorless chuckle as he continued to stare through the window.

She made a
tsk
-ing sound against the inside of her cheek. “Don’t ask me that,” she said, her censure light, but serious. “I – we – may not…
understand
your Delta.” Her tone softened. “But she’s still yours. And I don’t ever want you to hurt like this.”

“I’m not hurting,” he said automatically.

She stroked his hair again and was silent a long moment. She wouldn’t argue with him about his feelings. Finally, she heaved a little sigh and said, “Melinda Wales is dying.”

His head snapped in her direction. She looked tired and it reminded him that this week had been a long one for everyone.

“The cancer is everywhere – her stomach, her pancreas, her lungs…” she shook her head. “She’s got bronchitis and it’s just the last little thing to push her over…” another sigh, “she won’t see another month.”

Mike had met the woman only once, and had seen
, even in that short amount of time, just how fragile – physically, mentally, emotionally – Tam’s mother was. Tam had been taking care of her since he was a kid, taking on burdens no seven or eight-year-old should have ever had to carry. Cancer had begun its slow ravaging of her body nine or so years past, and before that, it had been her monstrous husband, Tam’s father, who’d abused her. Melinda dying wouldn’t mean anything to him, but it would mean something to Tam, and
that
was what left a cold knot in Mike’s stomach.

“Tam
– ”

“Is in a dark place,” Beth
said, her eyes sad. “We have to go home, Mikey. He needs us.”

**

“I swear, your dad could talk his way out of his own funeral,” Regina announced as she came breezing back into the room. Through the dressing table mirror, Delta watched her approach, wide hips swinging inside her flouncy white skirt, a short stack of papers in one hand. “He got you out of your honeymoon, got you seats on all three flights back to Atlanta. You’re all set.” The papers were set at her elbow; they were boarding passes, she realized.

“Thanks,” she murmured, and faced her reflection again. She’d spent thirty minutes, dippin
g into every jar and powder in her makeup case, and still she had dark bags beneath her red-rimmed eyes. Her crying jag – her overwhelming depression – showed in every line of her face, like all the muscles were numb.

It was nine a.m. and she should have been waking up to Caribbean sunlight streaming through the windows, to the smell of the ocean and flowering vines, to the weight of her husband’s arm draped across her, tangled and aimless and married and too content for words.

Instead, she was homeless, single, and shaking inside. And running late – she hadn’t had time to dry her hair and now it was a frizzy mess. She chose to focus on that – on her hair – rather than the horrifying prospect of walking out to the waiting vans in ten minutes. Because at the vans, there’d be the wedding party, and there’d be Mike…

She shoved him out of her mind before tears could start building at the backs of her eyes again. She had to
think of mundane, stupid things; it was all that kept her from thinking about him, and about her emotional upheaval. She would put her hair up in a scarf, she decided, and wear her sunglasses to hide her eyes, despite the rain. Rising to fetch both from her suitcase, she was halted by a knock on the door.

She froze,
her pulse stuttered, and she locked eyes with Regina for a panicked moment in which she tried to decide if it was hope or dread she felt at the thought of facing Mike. Regina lifted her brows in question and Delta nodded, when she could, heart thumping in painful anticipation.

Her reaction was wasted, though, because it wasn’t Mike, but his mother who stepped into the room and asked Regina if they could have a minute alone.

“It’s fine,” Delta assured, voice tight, and watched Regina slip out into the hall, closing the door behind her. Then she was alone with Beth Walker.

Beth was in a salmon-colored shirtdress belted at the narrowest point of her waist, flats and a white cardigan: soccer mom-
ish, but sweet. Her pinched expression reminded Delta too much of all those awkward, jostling, jealous dinners at the Walker dining room table. She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, eyes coming to Delta’s face, giving the impression of fortifying herself for whatever she was about to say. Delta didn’t ease the tension with any polite inquiries. As far as she was concerned, Beth had no reason to call on her, so she wasn’t going to help the moment along.

“I don’t guess,” Beth said when the silence had stretched beyond the point
of discomfort, “that you like me – us – very much right now.”

Delta blinked.

“But I just wanted to say…well, you and I don’t have much in common.”

“No, ma’am,” Delta said, voice quiet, “we don’t.”

Beth nodded and the gray light from the window touched on her green eyes in a way Delta hadn’t seen before. “But we have Mike. We have him in common.”

Did
, Delta thought.
Past tense
.

“I don’t know,” Beth went on, “what’s happening with the two of you, and I don’t want to. But before we left, I wanted you to know that, whatever he did – and trust me, I know the boy’s a royal ass when he wants to be – he does love you. I half expect you hate him and that I won’t see you again…but if your temper can cool, and if you can still love him…” she let it hang, but the way her brows lifted was anything but subtle.

I still have a chance
, she knew. If she wanted him, if she could untangle the snarls in her brain…

“I’m sorry, honey,” Beth said. “If it’s my fault at all, then I’m sorry.” She left without waiting for a reply which was a good thing, because Delta had no idea what to say.

**

Their departure from
Billingsly had the air of a funeral procession. Under a leaden sky and an insistent rain, black umbrellas screened a somber group that made its way down the front steps of the castle to the waiting vans. Delta shared an umbrella with Regina, the two of them pressing together to keep dry, fat drops pattering above their heads and dripping down onto their protruding shoulders.

At the bottom of the stairs, she paused, turned one last time,
took one last deep breath, wanting to remember this place, to torture herself with the pain it had caused her. Her eyes swept across the others, absently registering them, and then her gaze fell across Mike and she forgot about the castle and her one last look.

He stood rooted in place, his umbrella tilted back, watching her. The unguarded regret on his face, the sadness pressed into the fine lines between his brows, was almost her undoing. He was in jeans and gray t-shirt, an unzipped hoodie over it, casual and big-shouldered and familiar – his obvious depression dulled the edges of her heartbroken fury until she wondered, for a fleeting moment, if she was making a terrible mistake. She could fling herself through the rain and collide with his chest, throw her arms around his neck and absolve him of all those little sins that had left her afraid of him.

But she didn’t have the strength for that. She faced forward again, toward the van, and put her back to the castle, to Ireland, to the man who was supposed to be her husband.

For now, anyway.

37.

S
he went home: to her parents’ house, to her old room, to the life she’d left behind years before. People said – so many mindless people repeating overused phrases they didn’t understand – that you couldn’t go home. That wasn’t true. Her home was unchanged, and sleeping between the fluffy covers of her childhood bed, she was no different than she’d been back then; walking across the threshold had catapulted her back in time, to a place where she was uncertain and grasping, lonely and crushed, grieving over something so precious that going on without it felt insurmountable.

Delta had never before taken vacation time for anything personal, but she’
d already secured the days she’d need for her honeymoon. Going into work would have been such an obvious sign, her coworkers would have been whispering behind her back. So she took her honeymoon in the sultry, humid escape of the garden, reading, avoiding her parents and their hateful glares, steeling herself for the inevitability of retrieving her furniture, and most of all, analyzing every moment that had passed between her and Mike. Not just in Ireland, but before, from the moment she’d laid eyes on him in her store to the moment she’d watched his wide shoulders disappearing through the crowds at Hartsfield-Jackson when they’d landed. She recalled every smile, every touch, every lingering moment of eye contact, every kiss, every word, sweet or otherwise.

She spent a week drowning
herself in literature and torturing herself with the realization that had come to her.

She didn’t understand love, not the golden, shimmering, romance-novel stuff that existed between mates. She was skeptical
of it, and had never been one to pretend that it existed just for the sake of excitement. She didn’t know what it looked like, what it felt like…at least, she hadn’t. But she realized, amid the dancing tendrils of ivy that climbed the gazebo, that love – that good, golden kind she’d always discounted – didn’t arrive with a blast of trumpets and an earth-shattering epiphany. It was earned, formed, created, day by day, a little at a time. And it looked like Mike eating toast over her kitchen sink, felt like his hand smoothing her hair back off her face, sounded like his sudden shout of laughter when she spilled a whole sack of flour out of the top cabinet down onto her head in his kitchen, tasted like the kiss he used to make up for it.

He loved her, and Ireland had been a freak accident caused by so many things. But she still wanted those tow-headed
children, and his kiss on the back of her neck before she went to sleep every night, still wanted
him
.

But she’d ruined it.

She was reading
Emma
under the gazebo – trying to, anyway; she’d read the same line fifteen times – when she heard light, sure footsteps on the flagstone path and glanced up to see Mrs. Miller coming toward her.

The housekeeper greeted her with a quick smile. “There’s someone here to see you.”

Her heart rallied behind her breastbone. “Mike?”

“No, his sister.
The little one: Jo.”

As quickly as it had spiked, her adrenaline faded. She could think of no reason on earth why Jo Walker would want to see her, but morbid curiosity got the best of her. “Show her back, please.”

**

In his townhouse that looked and smelled and felt like Delta thanks to all her furniture cluttering every room, Mike had been unable to retreat into his lair and sulk properly. She was too fresh in his mind, her ghost too vivid and tangible, for him to even think of going about the business of forgetting her. So he was caught in limbo, waiting, and picked up the phone on the first
ring when his mom called to tell him that Melinda Wales was gone and Tam was missing.

Not missing, as it turned out, but en route. Mike heard the doorbell an hour later and knew it was Tam. A hot flush of indignant big brother anger swept through him and he didn’t try to tamp it down as he went down the stairs to answer the door. That anger wasn’t a private thing; Tam knew it existed
and, in a way, he must have respected it, because that was why he didn’t use his key and let himself in. He was asking. And Mike knew, under his layers of simmering hurt and aggression, that he wouldn’t turn his friend away, even if he deserved it.

All good and prepared for a confrontation, Mike threw the door open and found Tam sitting on his front stoop, his back curled and shoulders hunched, elbows braced on his knees, nursing a cigarette that sent thin flickers of smoke curling into the afternoon heat. His head swiveled around at the sound of the door opening and his complexion was too-pale, his expression vacant. If he’d apologized, if he’d said anything but what he did, Mike’s forgiveness would have been immediate and complete. But Tam had learned to tuck his grief in deep and go to an inhuman headspace long ago, and he asked, “How’s it going?”

Mike wanted to slug him. He wanted to pound the shit out of him. And he wanted to find the trigger that snapped him out of his pretend calm, because he couldn’t forgive the robot sitting on his front step.

“How’s it going?” he repeated. “Delta left me,” h
e said on a snarl, and grabbed Tam by the back of his shirt collar, hauled him, scrambling, up to his feet. The cigarette got lost as Mike spun him around so they were nose-to-nose, but the composure – Tam’s – didn’t. “I’ve got no wedding, and no wife, and a houseful of furniture thanks to you, jackass!”

Tam’s eyes were glassy and up close like this, his breath was heavy with the smell of whiskey. He was drunk out of his mind. He sw
allowed, throat working. “Sorry.” And even if it sounded sincere, he was still too detached.

It was on the tip of Mike’s tongue to accuse him of ruining the wedding, but that wouldn’t be fair because he and Delta had
wrecked everything themselves. Instead, he snorted. “Sorry. Yeah. What about molesting my sister? You ‘sorry’ about that too?”

Jo was the trigger.
Tam blinked and fury flooded through his glassy eyes, alive and fiery and akin to something animal – it had fangs and claws and not a shred of reason. It was what Ryan Atkins must have seen in the pub before Tam had launched at him. It was more than a little bit spooky.

Tam shoved him, hard, but Mike had been ready and he compensated, retreating into the foyer. Tam followed, but he’d had too much to drink and he wasn’t steady. “I didn’t,” he said through his teeth. “I
didn’t
.”

Mike dodged the lopsided punch that was thrown at him and took the only advantage he had – Tam’s inebriation. He caught him by the wrist, wrenched his arm around, and slammed him face-first up against the wall, snatching his other wrist an
d cranking it back to join the first. “You didn’t?” he asked, voice hard, and nearly lost hold of Tam as he fought the accusation not verbally, but physically.

“
No
,” Tam said against the wall. He turned his head far enough for Mike to see his snarl, to see the skittering shame and hurt and anger pull at his face.

Mike tightened his grip. “How old was she?” he demanded, needing to know as much as he hated the thought of knowing.

Tam was a tense bundle of juiced nerves, every muscle of his too-thin body clenched. “Seventeen.”

“Jesus.” Mike shook his head, but the picture was too clear. Jo at seventeen had been all eyes and wild hair and smart mouth.
Spunky and tomboyish and still just a baby. Tam would have been about to turn twenty-one, and Mike was all too aware of all the things that almost-twenty-one-year-old had known.

Disgusted, Mike pulled back and turned him loose with a shove. Tam took two staggering steps to the foot of the staircase and then sat. Mike watched the fight drain out of him in a sudden rush, watched his head slump over against the wall. The front door was still open, birdsong sweeping in to them, and in the
shameless summer light, Tam was stark white, his eyes vivid and haunted.

“She was just a kid,” Mike said. “And she’s my
little sister
.”

“She’s not
just
my little sister,” Tam said, and his gaze lifted and locked with Mike’s.  “She’s
everything
.”

The only way to make this thing even more screwed-up was to learn that Tam maybe had some sibling vibes for Jo in addition to whatever else he felt.
That was so far past normal…but Tam wasn’t normal. Never had been. Mike had known that all along, and he’d never, in all their years as friends, seen the guy so dead serious before. Women in general had never held any great fascination for him; emotions and sex hadn’t crossed paths in the remarks he’d offered over beers and cigars. But the eerie, intense light in his eyes now, the reverent way he said
everything
…Mike couldn’t pretend he was lying. Somehow, with his weak-willed, sickly mother fueling his resentment of the opposite sex, Jo – with dirt beneath her nails and a sailor’s vocabulary – had become this sister/friend/lover who was
everything
for Tam.

Mike wiped a hand down his face and groaned. “Are you serious?”

Unblinking, Tam stared up at him, his expression becoming desperate in a drunk, emotional way. “I should have said…should have asked…but Walt said…and my dad…” he took a deep breath and his eyes fluttered shut. “I’m sorry, man. I’m so sorry.”

Walt, Mike had learned the night of the rehearsal dinner, had known about the relationship, and when Tam’s father had come skulking around looking for his son, Walt had used the danger in that to twist Tam’s arm.
To force him into breaking things off with Jo.

And now Tam was this pathetic thi
ng sitting on his steps, tanked-up and lovesick and forcing Mike to think about his sister in ways he’d never wanted to.

But if his disastrous week in Ireland had taught him anything, it was that getting pissed didn’t pay off when it came to the people he loved. So he shoved his mental knots into a back corner for later, and sat down next to Tam on the stairs. He clapped a hand on his shoulder and squeezed.
“Yeah. I’m sorry, too.”

**

“You’re not like my friends,”
Delta had told Jo beneath the dappled light of the vines climbing the gazebo, and she hadn't meant it as an insult. As she glanced at Mike’s sister through the dark interior of her Mustang, Jo’s pixie face touched with blue from the dash lights, Delta couldn’t believe it was Jo who’d come to fetch her. She had decided that she wouldn’t press her cause, that it was Mike’s place to decide if he could forgive – she’d said as much to Jo as they’d climbed into the car.
“Well that’s just stupid,”
Jo had said with an unladylike snort.
“You want someone, you tell them.”

Jo was nothing like Delta’s friends – she was very much like
her
. It had been hard to spot under the tomboy façade, but Jo was ferocious in her own little way, and it was that ferocity that had prompted Delta to spill her secret, that had propelled her into this car and toward Mike’s townhouse.

“Life’s too short to mope around by ourselves when we love them,”
Jo had said, and Delta couldn’t have agreed more.

Butterflies took flight in her stomach, though, as Jo swung up into the drive of the townhouse and killed the engine. In front of them, Tam’s old Chevrolet whatever-it-was proved that Mother Walker had been right and the boys were drowning their sorrows together. Delta curled her hand around the door handle and tried to quell the nervous shivers that rippled through her. She loved Mike, yes, but she didn’t know if she trusted this night to be a revelation of that.

Jo was watching her; she could feel her eyes through the dark. “Mike won’t hear what I have to say if you’re up there with me,” she said, tone careful, but assured. “And I need him to make eye contact and hear it.” Translation: Jo needed Mike’s blessing before she went to Tam.

Delta wet her dry lips. “I’ll wait here.” She took a deep breath. “Send him out. If he can’t bear to see me, then…” then she wouldn’t have laid eyes on him and demolished the last clinging shreds of her heart.

Jo nodded and popped her door. “Wish me luck.”

Delta watched her slip out into the night. “Good luck,” she whispered beneath the slamming of the door.

It was a warm night and the windows were down, the humid brush of the darkness creeping in across the sills and touching her face. The crickets and cicadas were answering one another; a stereo thumped down the block somewhere. Delta waited, poised on the knife-edge of dreadful anticipation, shivering in her own skin, eyes straining through the darkness. As she watched, warm rectangles of light popped across the lawn; Mike had turned a light on inside, the foyer overhead, most likely. She could see it, could envision the harsh, lined look of his face as he greeted his sister.

Please
…she prayed.

When he appeared on the sidewalk, just a hulking shadow moving toward the driveway, she leapt back against the door, her heart stalling. How did she play this? Did she beg him? No – that wasn’t her style. How did she…what could she…?