Racing to Love: Eli's Honor (15 page)

CHAPTER NINE

For thirty-some minutes Honor put on the best show, sitting at the dinner table between him and her son, acting as if nothing had happened. Her light laughter at Dallas’s stories and jokes stirred something inside of him. The twinkle in her eye as she listened intently to what Dallas was telling her about the plans the men had for him on the track the next day, sent a surge through Eli’s system. Then he’d catch her attention and the red would flood her cheeks instantly.

She might be trying to appear calm in front of her son, but Eli could feel the sparks of excitement and fear crackling around her. No, she was definitely not going to be able to lie to him and tell him that moment meant nothing to her. She had kissed him back. There was need and desire behind it. She was as drawn to him as he was to her, Eli could feel it. If she tried to tell him otherwise…he had no problem calling her on it.

“And then Jesse said he wanted to work on starts first thing tomorrow,” Dallas said, cutting another bite of lasagna.

Eli grinned at her and again her cheeks went pink. She turned her attention to the plate of food she’d been playing with for the past few minutes. He nodded at
Dallas’s comment as he picked up the bottle of wine.

“That’s fine, then we’ll move to the whoops section,” Eli agreed with the boy as he was topping Honor’s glass off. Her eyes went wide. He felt a little sinful plying her with liquor, but if that was the only way to get her to open up, well then a man had to do what a man had to do. The woman was a clam, all safe smiles and polite thank-yous, but Eli knew better. There was something about Honor that made him want her, made him want to make her his. Her eyes watched his hand intently as he slowly poured the red wine into her glass.

She tipped her chin, her eyes meeting his as if to say that was plenty. He winked and kept pouring. Leaving proper etiquette behind, he filled the crystal to the top.

Seemingly unaware of the two of them,
Dallas dropped his fork on his plate and walked to the sink. Eli tried to contain his excitement. After Dallas’s dishes were loaded in the dishwasher, he smiled and left the room in a quick flash, his goodnights hollered over his shoulder.

Eli had been waiting for Honor to bust her son and his new video game habit, but so far she’d let him off the hook each night after dinner, as long as he had done what he could to keep up with his school work first. It really wasn’t fair to
Dallas. Eli snickered to himself proudly, he was glad the boy liked the newest video game he’d picked up, and in his mind it didn’t hurt anything for him to play a game that mimicked what he did on the track.

Before
Dallas even hit the doorway to the basement Honor was standing, clearing dishes off the table and hurrying to clean the traces of their meal away. Eli watched for a second, almost predatorily, taking in her skittish movements and her nervous breathing. When she reached for his empty plate, he stopped her with his hand around her slender wrist.

“You’re not waiting on me, sweetheart. I’ll help you,” He informed her, a slight teasing to his voice.

She blinked a couple of times with no answer, and when she turned, he let her slip out of his hold. At first, her pace was hurried, but when they settled into easy conversation over a sink filled with bubbles she relaxed. The two of them taking turns with the dishcloth between washing the larger items and wiping counters.

With the dishwasher loaded and running, the last pan dried and put away, and the granite shining once again, Honor turned, he assumed to escape to her bedroom for the evening. Eli had other plans. He grabbed her wrist a second time and grinned.

“Nice try, Honor. It’s time to talk.”

Eli gathered their wineglasses in one hand and ushered her into the family room with his other. She didn’t say a word, but she didn’t argue either, so he set her in the middle of the soft leather couch, then went to work building a fire.

To him there had always been something comforting about a fire. Gazing into the flames, watching them dance was relaxing to him. It made tense situations and conversations lighter, hard words were easier to say if the orange and red flames were available to focus on. He hoped it was the same for her.

He closed the wire mesh of the fireplace and made his way back around the coffee table to sit beside her. Leaning back he picked up both of their glasses. Honor took two long drinks before bringing her eyes up to meet his. She let out a shaky breath, but didn’t make any attempt to start the conversation.

Eli adjusted his position so he was turned into her, with his leg bent and resting on the couch, giving a more casual entrance for their conversation, “So, tell me more about you.”

She blinked, her brow scrunched together. He was trying not to laugh at her confusion, but he couldn’t help that the corners of his mouth turned up anyway. Apparently, he’d thrown her a curve ball. After their kiss that had left him hurting all the way to Jesse’s house, he knew that was what she had expected him to ask about.

“What about me?” She asked, her eyebrow raised.

Trying to take it slow, to find out more about her, he grinned. “Just tell me about you. You didn’t just walk into the world with an eleven-year-old. You have a past, I’d like to get to know you.”

Eli watched her eyes drift shut, watched her chest rise and fall with a large breath. When she opened her eyes again, the deer-in-the-headlights look was replaced with something that made Eli swallow hard. Her violet eyes were so haunted, so sad.

“You really want to do this? Go there? I don’t really share my life’s sad sob story with people, Eli.”

The knife turned in his chest. Everybody had a story, his mother always said.

Never judge a person until you know what they’ve lived through and pulled themselves out of. If they have survived, then count their blessings and yours too.

The words of the saint he was lucky enough to call his mother replayed in his head as if she was in the room, reminding him in person.

Honor was running her finger around the rim of her wineglass subconsciously making circle after circle. He gently pulled her hand to his lap and mimicked the motion with his finger on the soft skin of the back of her hand.

“I’d just like to know you, Honor.”

Know me? Whatever.

How would he feel when he heard just how little she had? It could be for the best. It was one thing to accept his help for her son. Once he figured out how different their worlds really were, maybe he’d go back to chasing something more in his league. Honor let out a breath.

“Well, okay, if you really want to know?”

His hand tightened on hers. “I really do, sweetheart.”

“Fine. In very short
form.”

She tilted her chin with a raised eyebrow, a silent warning for him not to press for more than that. Honor couldn’t believe she was getting ready to dive into her sordid past. There were just parts she wanted to forget, but to do that she’d have to come across as ungrateful for the one thing in her life that mattered most. Her life lessons were learned the hard way, graduating from the
school of
hard knocks
was not in her life’s plan, but that was how it all had come down.

Focusing on taking steady breaths, she stared into the red wine in her glass, trying to find the best place to start her story, hoping the words would come to her in the deep burgundy liquid. She took a deep swallow of the liquid courage and started.

“I guess you’d have to say everything all boils back down to parents. My sperm donor was gone the minute my mother informed him that she was pregnant. She spent the rest of her life doing two things—making sure I knew that men were worthless, and beating into me that to get ahead in life I didn’t need one. That they were only good for what was between their legs and that would only last two minutes, and maybe eighteen years.”

He sucked in a sharp hiss, the astonishment of her statement left him reeling. “Ah, Honor, how jaded. I’m so sorry.”

She shrugged. It wasn’t like her mother was a downer, she just had very definite views on the subject, and from earliest memory, Honor knew where her mother stood on the subject of boys, then men.

“That’s the biggest reason she got me into dance.”

He grinned, the hazel in his eyes warming back up again. “Ah, a dancer?”

She nodded. That was a previous life.

“I knew there was something about you, something I couldn’t put my finger on. But it’s in the way you move, the way you hold yourself. It’s different. So graceful.”

Honor let out a quiet snort. “I imagine so. Something I couldn’t break if I tried, I suppose. That’s what happens after eighteen years of ballet training.”

“A ballerina?” His mouth turned into a cheeky smile.

Somewhere between proud and impressed, she assumed. Again she nodded, with a flat indifference in her motions. She never let herself think of how great she could have been, of what she could have achieved, and other than
Dallas, there was nothing about her to be impressed with.

“I was headed to
New York…New York City Ballet—was going to try anyway.”

“I don’t mean to be shocked, but damn, girl. That’s remarkable. What happened?”

“By the time I was sixteen, I was dancing about twenty hours a week, more around performances, and almost double that in the summers. To help pay for it all, I started working at a little diner in town. Not making much, but a little, putting it all back, saving for New York. The plan was to graduate high school, my mom and I would work really hard for the next couple of years, save up and we’d hit the city together. We knew it was going to cost a fortune, and I couldn’t really afford to go back and forth trying to audition and secure a part first. We were going to have to risk it all and move there.

“After high school and two years at the diner, my mom getting a decent raise at the bank she worked at, and spending every spare minute at the local dance studio, we were almost ready to go. We wanted to be there and settled before the weather turned cold.

“The next thing I knew, it was over–our dreams, my dreams, all of those hours in the studio keeping me away from boys to keep me safe, keep me occupied…it went down the drain.”

“What happened?” Eli asked, his voice filled with concern.

“She died.”

His eyes went wide. “What?”

“Died. Obviously, it was very unexpected. Brain aneurysm. We never saw it coming. She was forty-one, I was twenty.”

Honor watched Eli’s face go through layer after layer of emotion, shock, empathy, sadness and several others, but never pity. That was good, she didn’t do pity, and most of all not from him. It was over, she’d put it behind her. Honor missed her mother, but they’d never had the type of relationship that she and Dallas had. Her mother was demanding, and the schedule she kept in the studio to keep her mother happy was grueling. She had loved dancing, she even believed it would solve her problems, but it definitely left her with no life outside of school, and a detachment from her mother.

From early on, her mother had Honor’s focus trained on making it big, becoming a prima ballerina. Juilliard wasn’t an option financially or logistically, so they made do with their local studio that was more affordable. She worked twice as hard as any other student in toe shoes.

Those kids…didn’t have to live with
her
mother.

She knew nothing outside of school, the diner, or life in the studio. When her mother died, her world came crashing down around her. The structure, the rules, and the constant reminder of why she was working so hard, were all gone. Having lived her whole life with the map in front of her was all she knew, then suddenly that map was crumpled and unreadable.

“My only friend I really knew asked me to come over. We had danced in several classes together over the years, although her mother wasn’t psychotic. Jenna’s mom was sweet and caring—we’d bake cookies and actually get to eat them. We could stay up and finish watching the movie we were into, even if it meant we’d lose forty-three minutes of valuable sleep. We could talk about boys and not be condemned.

“Jenna begged me to come over, said I needed to get out of the house, that it had been a month, said I needed to see something other than the walls of my house. I hadn’t been able to dance because, really…I didn’t know how I could pay for it, so why continue? Instead, I sat, packing box after box. My Uncle Travis wanted me to move in with him, I’d have no bills and I could figure out what I wanted to do. He was several years younger than my mom so we were close in age. We were actually more close friends than uncle and niece. He was in the military and often away, so that was the plan.”

Honor took a long drink of the wine still left in her glass, feeling the burn as it went down her throat. Her past was something she didn’t like to think of, except for the good things, Travis, and of course, Dallas. The rest was just exactly what she’d told Eli—a fucked-up sob story. She let out a breath, then a snort in disbelief that she was really telling him all of it, and continued on.

“Jenna and I were the same age, twenty. The main difference was she was allowed to date…I wasn’t. When I finally surfaced and made it to her doorstep, she pulled me in and brought me back to life. The next night, her boyfriend brought a pizza by, and his best friend.”