Have Mercy: A Loveswept Contemporary Erotic Romance (21 page)

He hadn’t exactly thought it through that far, but she wasn’t too far off, and he could tell that
she knew it. She looked sad, disappointed, maybe, and he’d put that look on her face. All he wanted to do was make her happy, and he’d done the exact damn opposite.

She shook her head and climbed back into the bed. “Take your clothes off and get back in here,” she ordered, and some of the horrible void in his gut eased with the bossy order. “I’m not letting you leave yet.”

Letting her tell him what to do was such a sweet relief. He knew he could take it too far, easily, but she was right. Running out of her room half-dressed in the middle of the night was ridiculous. He doffed his jeans and climbed back in bed with her.

“Does it hurt your ass if you roll onto your back?”

“A little, but I don’t mind.”

Emme pushed at his shoulder until he lay down, then curled up beside him with her head in the crook between his shoulder and his arm. “Do you like owning a bar?”

Like had never entered the picture. Tom had inherited the bar and made the best of it. He’d turned it around and made enough of a profit from it to function, no mean feat after years in the red under his father’s management. “I don’t have a choice.”

“You realize you could sell it.”

For just a moment, he let himself imagine it. On tour, playing bass, making very little money, but with no responsibility beyond what was in front of him—to Emme, to the band, to music, and to their audience. No weight dragging him away from her, no constant gnawing dread, no checking his phone for the next disaster. It was a seductive and dangerous image.

“I can’t.” The words were out of his mouth before he had a chance to think about them.

“Why not?” Emme traced a finger around the tattoo on his chest over and over again.

“It was my dad’s. I grew up there.”
He left it to me and that’s my legacy—an albatross around my neck
. “I can’t explain it. I know it doesn’t make sense; it’s not like we had the greatest relationship, but he was my dad. This is all I’ve got left of him.” Stupid, maybe, how love made him hold on to something he wasn’t sure he wanted. Doubly stupid when he considered that loving Emme made him want to let go of it and grab onto her instead.

“Yeah, but do you like it? Is it what you want to do?”

Tom shrugged, the question making his skin feel too tight. “I don’t know. That’s like asking me if I wanted to raise my sister. Not really, I guess, but you do what you have to do. And sometimes, you do a shitty job of it and your sister steals from your business.”

“You can’t honestly think that,” Emme said, her voice full of disbelief. “You think that your sister stealing from you is somehow your own fault?”

“I’m the one who raised her.”

Her intake of breath at his side was furious. “You aren’t the one who decided to have a child you couldn’t raise. You were a kid, Tom. A
kid
. A kid who was trying to do right by his sister with no help from anyone. Don’t you
dare
talk about yourself that way.” She pushed herself up from his side, all blazing anger. “I’m really mad at you.”

“I noticed.” Something about her anger made it harder for him to hold onto his. If she was angry at him, he didn’t have to be angry at himself.

That was probably really messed up.

He reached for her, got an armful of her warm body, and pulled her closer.

“I’m still pissed,” she warned, but she came willingly as he kissed her, her mouth soft under his. When she nestled back down by his side, he felt calm again. Safe.

“I know it doesn’t make sense,” he said. “My dad wasn’t exactly a great father. I’m pretty sure that bar was the only thing he ever loved.” He thought about Emme, hitting herself with his belt to make sure she wouldn’t hurt him, the concern in her eyes when she demanded he name a safe word, made him promise to use it. That unquestioning acceptance and her small hand making circles on his back, asking him what he needed, willing to grant it even when it hurt her career, the most important thing in her life.

No one had ever given him that kind of love. His family certainly hadn’t and now they were going to take it away from him, too.

He wanted to weep, but he hadn’t let himself in so long, he thought he’d forgotten how.

So instead, he held Emme, pulled her close, tucked her head into the side of his shoulder. He let the warmth of her skin sink into his body and kissed the tips of her fingers. He tried to stay awake even as she fell asleep so he could watch her face as she dreamed, memorize it, absorb as much of her love as he could before he threw it all away.

He’d always known that this couldn’t last, that people like him didn’t get happy endings with the girl and the band and the cheering fans in the audience. People like him got work and frustration and police reports with only a few shining, beautiful moments in between to hold onto in the darkness of their day-to-day lives.

Tom would never forget the look on Emme’s face when she dropped him off at the Atlanta airport.

Last-minute flights weren’t cheap, but it was just another cost he’d have to add in with all the others, monetary and not. Andy, thank God, had agreed to fly out to cover him, and Emme had driven the van to the airport.

Emme had been quiet as she waited for him, but he could sense the energy in the air of the van like the quiet before a thunderstorm erupted—heavy and dark and swirling. He didn’t speak either, watching the midday traffic build and the shiny high-rise hotels fade into the background, sunk deep into a pit of self-recrimination.

When she finally spoke, it was in a voice devoid of emotion and without taking her eyes off the road. “I’m still angry.”

“You should be. I’ve let you down.”

She sighed in response. “Yes but not the way you probably think.”

Just order me to stay with you
. If she did, he’d do it, and he wouldn’t feel bad about abandoning all his other responsibilities. It wouldn’t be his fault then. It would be at her command, and he couldn’t tell her no. “In what way, then?”

“Whatever you’re telling yourself—that you’re wrecking my tour, that you’re hurting my career, that I’m mad about any of that—you’re wrong. If any of my bandmates had an emergency and had to leave the tour, I’d understand. It sucks, but I’d understand.” Her hands were tight on the steering wheel, he noticed, as she changed lanes. She still didn’t so much as glance at him. “But Tom. You don’t want this. You don’t want to leave the tour, and you don’t want to own that bar, and your sister will never change as long as you keep rescuing her from herself. And what’s worse is that you don’t have to do any of it, but you’ve put yourself in a prison of your own making.”

“You expect me to let my business run into the ground?”

“I expect you to see that you have options that don’t keep you trapped and miserable when you have something that makes you happy
right here
that’s yours to take.”

That sentence felt like a gut-punch and he lost his breath for a minute. “I can’t.”

“I’m sorry about your sister.” Emme didn’t look at him, but she reached over and took his hand. “I can’t imagine how you must be feeling.”

Tom squeezed her hand. “I barely know what I’m feeling.”

Emme was silent for a long time. When she spoke, she sounded exhausted. “Where do we go from here?”

He felt the sting at the back of his throat and swallowed against it. “I don’t know.”

Emme nodded. She pulled up in front of the departures gate and stepped out of the van. Tom unloaded his bags and set them on the curb. He felt sick, filled with grief and fear and loss. Emme looked beautiful as always, but her nose and eyes were pink, like she’d been trying to hold back tears. The wind caught a strand of her hair and pulled it forward, out of her ponytail, toward his face, and he reached up to push it back into place.

The moment his hand touched her hair, the tears fell, and she smeared at them with her fists and turned away. “Let me know what your plans are,” she said, and her voice wavered.

“Emme—” He reached for her, but she’d already pulled the van door open and climbed back inside.

When the plane landed in Louisville, he’d had to have one of his buddies drive him home. Not even the prospect of sleeping in his own bed was a comfort; he’d slept the best he ever had in his life with Emme snuggled tight in his arms, and he suspected that a night wouldn’t pass again for a long time without him wishing she were there again.

The first thing he noticed when they pulled up in front of his house was the new damage to the bumper of his car in the driveway. He wished he could say he was surprised, but by that point, he’d entered what he thought was a state of calm resignation. He’d given Katie the use of his car. She’d promised to go to her meetings. Quite obviously, she’d stopped going and started drinking, which boded poorly for the state of his vehicle. Though between the missing money, the need to fire his manager, and the fact that he’d called the cops to report his own sister, a scratched bumper seemed the least of his worries.

Then he unlocked his front door.

Tom had always been tidy; he’d had to be to function. His father had been too busy working or drinking to keep the house neat and orderly, and Tom had always found satisfaction and comfort in a living space that had a place for everything.

But when he opened his door, he found utter chaos. There were empty liquor bottles all over the living room, stains on the carpet, overflowing ashtrays on every surface. Even his couch cushions had been tossed off the sofa and onto the floor. The kitchen was piled with dirty dishes and trash; it smelled like Katie hadn’t taken the garbage out in months, though he hadn’t been gone that long. There were
more empty liquor bottles, and although Tom wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking at, when he found tiny plastic baggies on the counter, he knew that Katie’s problems were much, much bigger than he’d thought.

For a moment he didn’t even know where to begin. He sank down into a kitchen chair only to end up on top of a pizza box. There was just so much cleanup to do, he couldn’t process how to start.

When he’d left for the tour, Katie had seemed like she was doing so well. Not altogether perfect, of course, but better than she had been in ages. Well enough that he could trust her to a degree. Had he caused this downward spiral by leaving? Or was it all manipulation, a way of ensuring that he’d never really leave if there was always an emergency at home when he did?

He didn’t even
like
his house that much—it, like the bar, had belonged to their father, and it, like the bar, had taken him years of work to make functional again. And Katie had managed to put a damn good dent in that functionality in just a month.

He’d left Emme for this. He’d left a tour where he did what he loved every single night, where he felt electrified every time he made music with his bandmates, where he saw cities he’d never traveled to before, for a wrecked house, a damaged car, and a sister who had slid backward and seemed determined to take him down with her.

He needed some answers.

But first, he stood up and grabbed the garbage bags from under the kitchen sink and got to work.

This was his life. This house was where he lived. It all felt a little unreal like a recurring bad dream; familiar, but not true, after being away for so long. He’d accepted it for so long, it was amazing how little time it took for him to reject it and hope for more.

Emme would be happy if she never saw the Atlanta airport again.

She’d been furious with Tom, at first, when she dropped him off, angry at him for denying himself what he deserved and angry at him for denying them what they both wanted from each other. And then he’d reached for her, a vine-seeking-the-sun movement toward her, and she’d had to hide in the van to keep from sobbing like a wreck in front of everyone in the airport.

Then she’d had to wait three hours for Andy’s flight to show up since it was delayed. Three hours sitting in the goddamn airport, and she couldn’t even get good and drunk and feel sorry for herself since she had a show to play and a fifteen-passenger van to navigate back to her hotel, and she didn’t particularly want to sit in a room filled with strangers and cry.

And then, because that was exactly what she needed, her mother called.

“Donald had the landscapers add a flower bed out front,” she said in greeting. “Do you like petunias?”

Emme’s brain couldn’t switch gears quickly enough to catch on. “I’m sorry?”

Her mother sighed. “And we hired a housepainter because the paint on your trim was peeling. The thing is, if you really do succeed, people are going to want to take pictures of your house. You really have to take some pride in it.”

“Wait—what? You hired painters to paint my house?” Emme sank into a vinyl chair and cupped the phone closer to her ear to hear over the noise of the baggage claim. She could hear herself sounding like an ungrateful teenager and she didn’t like it. “That was—unnecessary, Mom. Very kind of you and Donald but unnecessary.”

“Well. I don’t want people talking. At least not any more than they already do.”