Meant to Be Mine (A Porter Family Novel Book #2) (24 page)

Ty nodded.

“Without mentioning your involvement.”

“Without mentioning my involvement to Celia or anyone.”

“Except Jerry.”

“Except Jerry,” he agreed. “Otherwise, it’s our secret.”

“So at the end of every week, when I write Celia a check, you’re going to write me a check for half the amount?” Donetta’s head angled in question.

“Every week. You have my word.”

She rolled her tongue around in her mouth, thinking it over.

He’d left Las Vegas after their wedding and gone on to achieve far more than his rightful share of his dreams. Celia had gone on to achieve none of hers.

The time had come to make that right. Celia had always wanted to own a coffee shop. Cream or Sugar didn’t belong to Celia and was probably in worse shape than the bakery she’d imagined. But it gave him a place to start.

“Ty?” Donetta extended her hand, and Ty shook it. “You have yourself a deal.”

C
elia froze as a sudden epiphany struck.

She shook the bottle of multivitamins she’d been in the process of lifting from her kitchen drawer. Then shook them again for good measure, listening.

All at once she knew exactly what sound had come from Ty’s pocket yesterday when they’d been sitting down together at Sally’s Snow Cones. It had been the rattle of pills in a medicine bottle. It had
not
been nothing.

It could be he was carrying around something benign, of course. Maybe Tylenol or a container of gum or mints. If she’d heard that telltale rattling coming from anyone else’s pocket, she wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But knowing Ty’s personality and the circumstance of his injured leg and lost career . . . Her instincts warned her that she needed to give it a
long
second thought.

She glanced out the windows. It was fully dark. She’d tucked Addie into bed more than an hour ago.

Were the pills pain meds? If so, was Ty’s pain so urgent he needed to keep them in his pocket? Worry twined through her thoughts. Could he be using the pills to medicate more than physical hurt?

She grabbed her phone and dialed. “Uncle Danny?”

“What’s up, C?”

“Would you mind coming over to my place for a little bit? Addie’s asleep, and I need to run an errand.”

“Happy to.” He did not ask what kind of errand she needed to run at nine o’clock at night. Yet another reason why she loved him. “Be there in five.”

At some point before Celia had arrived in Texas, Ty had added the gingerbread house key and also his house key to her key ring. She hadn’t had occasion to use his house key until now. She slotted it into the lock on his front door and turned it smoothly. If she barged in and found him wrapped in a set of foolishly trusting feminine arms, then so be it.

She closed the door behind her and strode purposefully across his foyer in the direction of his bedroom—

“Well, this is a nice surprise.”

His voice brought her to a halt. Slowly, she turned. He was sitting in a suede chair in his dark living room, the TV flickering with an image of two men beating each other up inside a ring. He’d propped his bad leg on an ottoman. An investment-type magazine lay on the side table next to him with his reading glasses on top, as if he’d set both aside when he’d switched off the lights. All in all, a pretty lonely-looking Saturday night for Holley’s best-loved celebrity.

“If you were on your way to my bedroom, don’t let me stop you.” His sardonic smile reminded her of a hunter observing prey. “I’ll follow you there.”

“As if.”

“You didn’t come by for a slumber party?”

“Of course not.”

“When you pulled me into your bedroom back in Corvallis, things seemed a little premature. Believe me, I’m
more
than ready to shut myself into a bedroom with you now.”

Her knees went limp like Jell-O at the dangerous timbre in his voice. It struck her how alone they were, the two of them, in the
dark and private interior of his house. “Once again I’ll remind you that we both agreed to be respectful friends.”

“I remember you doing a lot of talking after our kiss. My memory is sketchier on what I agreed to.”

She pulled the cord on a nearby lamp. In response, honeyed light fell from it, burnishing one side of his face. Crossing halfway to him, she hitched up her yellow dolman top, which kept wanting to slide off her shoulder, then set her hands on her hips. “Stand up.”

His gaze bored into her with piercing force as he stood, gripping his chair’s back to compensate for his ruined leg. He had on a black T-shirt, gray basketball shorts, and an invisible sign across his chest flashing
IRRESISTIBLE
in neon letters.

“Empty your pockets.”

His brows formed a V. “My pockets?”

“Empty them.”

“No.”

“Remember when I asked you ‘what’s that sound’ yesterday? I think I know. Pills?”

His face lost its humor. “They’re for my leg.”

“Let me see them.”

“My prescriptions are none of your business. We’re respectful friends, remember?”

“I leave Addie in your care all the time, Ty. In order for me to trust you with our daughter, I need to know what you’re taking.” She presented her hand palm up.

He ignored it.

“I’ll get the bottle myself if I have to,” she threatened.

“I’d enjoy it if you tried.”

“Hand it over.”

He pushed a hand into a pocket, then flipped a bottle through the air to her.

She caught it and angled it to the light. “Vicodin.” Frowning, she considered him. “This is a narcotic and also habit forming.”

“Take it up with my doctor if you don’t like it. He has something called an MD.”

Whenever she spent time with him during the day, he was entirely too quick-witted and sharp-eyed to make her think him anything other than fully lucid. Even so, she sensed danger in the bottle she held in her hand. She could almost feel it against her palm, the peril these small pills represented for Ty.

His career had been ripped from him by injury. And goodness knows he could be too daring. Disappointment plus pain plus a careless nature? Not a good combination, especially because Ty had no one to keep close tabs on him. “Are you careful to take exactly the dose prescribed?”

“Careful enough.”

“Wrong answer.” She whirled and stalked to his bedroom. It made her mad, the chances he took with himself. The stupid stunts, the bull riding, and all the rest of it.
What’s the matter with him?

His bedroom carpeting muffled her footsteps as she sailed past the bed and into a master bathroom that glistened with polished travertine. She could hear the thud of Ty’s crutches moving fast behind her, following.

If this prescription had been given to anyone a shade less self-destructive than Ty, she wouldn’t have felt it necessary to take drastic action. She unscrewed the childproof lid and held the bottle above the toilet.

Ty rushed to a stop in the bathroom’s doorway. “What the—”

She dumped all the pills in. They made quiet splashing sounds.

“Why did you do that?” he demanded.

The empty bottle had his doctor’s contact information on it, so she tucked it into her shorts. “Because Addie loves you.”

“And you? How do you feel about me?”

“I . . . care about you.”

He jerked his chin toward the toilet. “I need those to sleep.”

“Then allow me to recommend warm milk.”

“I’d like to see you try to sleep with a shattered knee.”

“Warm milk and Advil, then. Do you have any more bottles of Vicodin anywhere else?”

He set his lips in such a way that she knew he did. She slid one
bathroom drawer after another open. In the third one she found a second bottle. Unscrew. Dump. Splashy sounds. This time she flushed the toilet and threw the bottle in the trash for good measure.

Ty glared at her, eyes fiery.

“I’m going to call your doctor on Monday and give him a piece of my mind. You injured yourself over a month ago, Ty.”

“You don’t know anything about recovering from this type of injury.”

“That’s true. However, I do know something about you. You’re a great pretender, but I want you to tell me how you’re really doing. Since the accident. Look into my face and tell me the honest truth.”

“I’m doing fine.”

She searched his features, carefully weighing. “You’re struggling.”

“I will be tonight, since you’ve thrown away my medicine.” He pushed a hand through his hair, leaving tracks. “You do realize I can get a refill tomorrow.”

“I need you to promise me that you won’t do that.”

He only stared at her. Time ticked by, and her throat turned dry. She wished she could hug him and apologize and assure him that she was only doing this because someone needed to. Someone, anyone—her, even—needed to watch over him and protect him from himself.

Silence pulled for so long that she grew certain he had no intention of promising her anything. She’d go home, regroup, and prepare to fight this battle with him again tomorrow.

He was mostly blocking the doorway, and didn’t move to let her pass. She turned to the side to edge by. As she did, his arms extended so that they trapped her, one on each side, his palms planted against the wall near her head. The crutches fell with a clatter.

Celia looked into his face, so close she could see the darker blue icicles cutting into the pale blue of his irises. Need coursed through her, mixing with nervousness and determination. She collected her courage. “Promise me you won’t take any more Vicodin.”

Their profiles hovered just inches apart. Her breath entangled with his. Still, he didn’t speak.

She licked her lips.

His gaze followed the motion. Heat and strength radiated from his body.

“Addie,” she whispered—

“And you?”

“Addie
and I
need you to find a healthy way to come to terms with everything that’s happened to you. For what it’s worth, I have faith in you, Ty.” Quaking inside, she looked straight into his eyes. “This is hard, what you’re going through. But I believe that you can come through it without Vicodin and without going off the deep end. I need you to believe that, too.”

She could tell by the hardening of his jaw that she’d struck a nerve. Her ability to read him had not failed her. “Now. Please promise me that you won’t take any more Vicodin.”

“Tell me something first.”

“Okay.”

“You said you cared about me. I want to know how much.”

She never let herself think about the depth of her feelings for him. No way could she tell him what she didn’t know herself . . . at least not without ending her ramblings by taking hold of his face and kissing him until she had no breath left. He smelled like heaven.

She ducked below his arm, dodging away from the hand that made a grab for her. “I care about you the way respectful friends care about each other,” she called over her shoulder as she dashed from the room.

“Celia!” he yelled.

She ran. Ran and ran, perhaps even leaving his front door gaping. Ty didn’t scare her, but the dark temptation he made her feel terrified her right down to the center of who she was.

Two a.m. came and went. Then three a.m.

Ty couldn’t sleep. He read about trading and walked aimlessly
through his deserted house. He watched the YouTube clips of his ride on Meteor.

Finally he dug through a dusty stack of old CDs until he found one with a peeling sticker on its case that read
Ty and Celia Got Hitched at the Luv Shack!
above their wedding date. He hadn’t viewed the pictures in years. He fed the disc to his computer and very slowly clicked through the eight photographs.

He and Celia looked like kids—dumb kids. Especially him. They also looked so over-the-top happy together and Celia looked so painfully pretty that after he’d spent long minutes poring over them, he couldn’t bear to look at them anymore, to remember. He ejected the CD and returned it to the bottom of the pile.

He’d wrecked everything that morning in Vegas. When he’d woken up and found himself in the middle of the wreckage, his decision to try to salvage his relationship with Tawny had been the best choice left to him. Or at least he’d thought so then and for almost six years. Now he wasn’t so sure. He went back to pacing his dark house.

To his surprise, Advil mostly took care of the ache in his leg. If only it worked as well on the emotional junk that wouldn’t go away.

He found himself in his big modern kitchen, an empty place no one baked banana muffins in. He opened his pantry and looked at the food on his shelves. He could stick a bag of popcorn in the microwave. But why? It was three a.m. His stomach felt like a stone. His vision had gone blurry with tiredness. He didn’t want food.

He wanted a small curly-haired woman and his little girl to live here with him. Since he couldn’t have that, he wanted his old life back. But he couldn’t have that, either.

He ended up planting his forearms on the granite island, interlocking his fingers, and lying his forehead on his wrists. His chest expanded and contracted. How had Celia looked into him and seen what she’d seen tonight? She’d stripped him bare with her words, held a mirror up to him, and left him no place to hide.