Deceiving Lies

19

Kash

I FOUND RACHEL sitting out on the porch in her favorite chair with her arms crossed under her chest, and her knees bent with her feet on the cushion of the chair. With a deep breath in, I made my way to the chair near her and automatically grabbed her ankle to bring her feet onto my lap.

My eyes shot up when she quickly pulled her leg back, but there was no lingering anger in her action. She had this anxious look about her, as if she wasn’t comfortable with me taking her out of the position she was in. Without a word, I sat back and decided against asking what was so essential about staying like that.

“Where’s Trip?”

I tried not to roll my eyes at her attempt at pushing aside the awkward tension that had just formed between us, and cleared my throat. “He’s at Mason’s. He came and picked him up before we got home yesterday. We both felt it would be better to not have any distractions between you and me for a while.” And then I’d gone and slept on the couch.

Rachel pursed her lips and started involuntarily picking at her nail polish. I started to ask her how she’d gotten it while she was gone but decided I might not want to know.

“Do you feel better being out here?”

She nodded mindlessly for half a minute before clearing her throat. “I was thinking earlier how funny it was. Trent’s room and mine felt safe there. Like if we weren’t in one of them, anything could go wrong. I hated the walks to and from them, and once we were back in one, I could finally breathe again. But now, all bedrooms just seem like a cage.”

I had to shut my eyes and breathe in and out through my nose for a few seconds before I could look back up at her. Every time I thought about him with her, and every time she talked about him, was like tearing my soul open all over again. I played Mason’s words over and over in my mind and waited until I knew I could speak without gritting out the words.

“Do you want to tell me about what happened? Tell me about him?”

“Why?” she asked on a pained laugh. “I know what you think, it’s all over your face what you think I feel for him . . .” She trailed off before whispering, “What you think happened.”

“I’m giving you a chance to talk about him without feeling like it’s an interrogation instead of an interview.”

Her head turned quickly to face me, and the same anger from earlier was back and covering a deep ache. “Or maybe it’s because you’re looking for a more concrete reason to tell everyone else the wedding is off?”

“I don’t want the wedding to be off.”

“Oh, no?”

“Of course not.” Digging into my pocket, I pulled her ring out and leaned forward so my elbows were resting on my knees. “I told you to never take this one off,” I murmured. “What did the note mean? What do you understand?”

“I understand your wanting to call the wedding off. I’m sure you’re right, I’m sure I’m not the same Rachel anymore.”

I looked up so I could see her face and watched as she turned her head away and brushed at her cheeks. “What?”

“So I won’t put you in the position of having to break up with me . . . I won’t make you be seen as the man that broke up with his fiancée the day after she was rescued.”

“Rachel, I’m not breaking up with you. I don’t want to call off the wedding, why are you saying all—”

“I heard you talking to your parents last night, Logan! Don’t lie to me.”

“I— Shit.” I groaned and sat back in my chair. “I don’t want to call off the wedding. I’m sorry you heard that conversation, but, Rachel, I was mad and confused and thought you were in love with that guy!”

“Trent. His name. Is. Trent.”

“I know what his name is, Rachel, please try to see it from my side. I reacted the wrong way, I wasn’t thinking about you, and I’m sorry about that. I lost my shit when I saw you kissing him and when you immediately left me for him, and then to find out later that he was the one to steal you from our damn house? None of it made sense to me, and it killed me to watch you not know what to say to Byson when he asked if you’d had a sexual relationship with him. I was hurt, and I was pissed, and I was so fucking jealous I couldn’t see straight. So last night I was just lashing out because I was too scared to find out what really happened between you two. I was wrong. I know that. I’m so damn sorry you heard that conversation, but that isn’t what I want, that isn’t how I feel; and I’m ready to listen to you now.”

I took in her closed-off posture and after fumbling for a moment, put the ring on the table near us, closest to her. Rachel stared at the ring for a long time before looking back at me. Those blue eyes of hers were so guarded I had no idea what she was thinking or feeling, and I hated it.

“This ring belongs to you, and the only place I want it is on your left hand . . . and hopefully someday if you’ll still have me, I want it accompanied by another ring. Like before, I won’t push you, but this is yours. If you decide to put it on again, Rachel, you better understand what I’m saying this time. I don’t want you taking that ring off.”

She didn’t move toward the ring, and she didn’t say anything. She just stayed in the same position, staring at me.

“You were still wearing your ring when we found you. So, tell me something,” I said softly, “while you were gone, were you hoping to escape, or to be found . . . and did you ever think about us and our future together?”

“Of course I did.” She sounded like I’d insulted her with my question. Thankfully, after turning away from me, she continued. “I never gave up hope until the day before you came for me. Trent said you . . . all of you . . . stopped looking for me. That you hadn’t been looking for me for a week. I figured you thought I was dead. That was the first time I ever felt like there was no hope. Every day before that I thought about you, thought about how long it probably was until we were supposed to get married. What you were telling people.” She paused and chewed on her bottom lip for a second before rushing out, “I wrote to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Trent bought me a journal. I wrote to you the same way I write to my parents. I never stopped thinking about you, or us.” When she looked at me again, her eyes were glassy, and it was taking all my willpower to stay in my chair and not take her in my arms. “Did you?” she asked suddenly.

“Did I what?”

“Did you stop looking for me?”

I shifted forward again and brought my hands close to where her feet rested flat on the seat cushion. “Not the way you’re thinking. I was almost positive I knew where you were. Enough that Mason agreed to go in with me and attempt to rescue you if you were there. I had been taken off the case immediately because I was too close to it. So I did my own investigating. I looked all over the streets and used every resource I had until I got a lockdown on the building. By that time, the department had already figured out from the tests they did on the hair from your brushes, that at the very least, the hair they sent wasn’t yours. Just like the blood wasn’t even human. So they had to begin assuming all the ‘evidence’ was false, and they stopped responding to the men who took you when they called.

“Only problem is that it could have gone two ways: one, they would go crazy trying to get the department’s attention and mess up enough that the department could find them. Or two, they would get so frustrated with the department that they would actually do something to you. From what Mason said, the department was banking on the fact that since they gave you a month before they said they would kill you, and they stopped responding to them right before a month was up, it would make them crazy wondering why the department stopped looking for you all of a sudden in the last hour. The department assumed I still knew what was happening and would find out soon that they had stopped looking for you and would flip, so they began watching me like a hawk. I couldn’t do anything right away, but every day that passed was killing me. And then I found out about the building you were in. So Mason and I finally started the process of figuring out how to get you back. But we needed to be careful with our jobs, losing them would have been the least of our worries for a while if we would have just rushed in. That took another few days.”

“Are you going to lose your job?”

“No. Because, technically, we could say we were finishing up an old job. And we did find you. We might get a few days’ suspension, but nothing serious.” Keeping my eyes on her face, I slowly moved my hands up her feet to her ankles, and back down. Her body stilled, but she didn’t move away from me again, so I continued the path. “I don’t know what they told you while you were there, but did Byson explain why you were taken?”

“Not really. He didn’t say much that made sense. He asked if I was ever tortured and asked if there were any other girls there, that the department had been sent evidence of me being tortured. As for where I was kept, a few of the guys at the house let it slip one of the last nights that some guy named Romero would want Trent ‘out’ because he’d turned on the rest of the guys. I ended up guessing that Trent was in a gang, and after trying to find out who Romero was, I more or less guessed that he was in prison and was calling the shots. But I still don’t know who Romero is or why I was taken.”

“It was my fault you were taken, Rachel.”

A brief smile crossed her face and her eyes darted over to mine for a second. “Well, you are the one that works in the gang unit. I kind of figured that too, but that wasn’t until the same moment when I knew for sure that you would find me . . . only to find out less than a minute later that you had already stopped looking for me.”

“You remember the last gang Mason and I infiltrated?”

She nodded and thought for a second. “Juarez.”

“Right, and he’d put that hit on us as insurance because he thought we were cops, which is why we had to go undercover in Texas. Juarez and his boys from the meth house are still in prison, as are the two men that were hired to take Mase and me out. Apparently Romero Juarez has two houses for his gang. Mase and I weren’t in with him long enough to be trusted to even know about the other house, which is made up of the men you were with.”

Rachel looked shocked. I believed her when she said she hadn’t known why she was taken, but I still didn’t understand why this Trent guy never told her why he was keeping her if he was supposed to be helping her.

“They wanted their brothers out and, more importantly, the head of their ‘family.’ They were using you to do that, and to get back at me and Mason. From what you said yesterday, you didn’t see the destruction in our bedroom from when they took you. But on one of the walls in red spray paint were the words ‘Did you think we would forget?’ and the gang’s symbol. As soon as I saw that I knew why you were taken. I just didn’t know who had you, and how to get you back. They didn’t want money, just the members out of jail. Which is obviously something the department couldn’t do and why it took so long to get you. We just had to hope we found you before they—well, before they did what they threatened to.”

“What they threatened to . . . I—” Rachel shook her head rapidly before dropping her face into her hands. “I just don’t know.”

“Don’t know what, Rach?”

“This is—well, from your side it seems like a completely different kidnapping. Like I feel like I have no connection with it at all, none of it triggers anything. I never saw any of that. I never saw any of the ‘torture’ that you apparently were receiving evidence of. I didn’t know they were in contact with you. It was just . . . nothing, basically. Just a whole lot of nothing. Being confused about why I was there and why they would take me. Confused about Trent being so nice and making himself so uncomfortable to make sure I was safe. And just day after day of absolutely nothing but sitting on the mattress, being given meals, and writing in my journal.

“Yours sounds terrifying . . . not that I wasn’t scared. I was always so scared. But mine sounds like nothing compared to what you were thinking I went through. I was really just kept in a room, and I was taken care of. There was never any danger . . . up until the end.”

Scooting my chair closer so I could cup the back of her neck, I licked my lips and struggled to find the words. “Rachel, you have no—you don’t understand—fuck. Seeing you yesterday. Seeing you alive, seeing you completely whole and well was the biggest relief of my life. You have no idea how damn happy I am, how happy everyone at the department is, that you weren’t tortured. But don’t downplay what you went through. No one should have to go through what you did, and I still hate that you went through a minute of it, let alone over a month. You may not have been tortured, but that’s just a blessing right now. It doesn’t change what still happened.”

She took a shuddering breath in and held it for a while before releasing it and resting her chin on her knees. Her eyes were glassy, but no tears were falling. I hated that she didn’t look happier to be home. I hated that she didn’t want to be closer to me. I just hated this whole damn thing.

“Tell me about . . . tell me about him, Rachel. I won’t ask questions like the detectives did yesterday, just tell me about your time with him.”

“I know you don’t want to hear about him,” she huffed. “You’re just going to be more pissed off hearing his name. Every time I say it I see the way your eyes harden.”

There was no point in denying that. And I really didn’t want to hear about him. But she looked so lost, the only way I knew how to help her was to get her to talk. If she didn’t, she was going to shut down and start shielding against me. I wasn’t about to go through that with her again.

Not giving her the option to pull away, I grabbed both ankles and sat back in my chair before placing her feet on my lap. She looked down at her feet, but didn’t move them and didn’t say anything.

“Tell me all of it, start from the beginning. Don’t leave anything out for my benefit, Rachel, really, I want to hear it all.”

HOURS LATER, we’d moved back into the house so I could make us lunch. Rachel never once stopped talking as I cooked, and only took brief breaks when she was chewing. A couple hours in, I started trying to remember why I’d originally hated Trent when I realized I was thankful that he had gone out of his way to make sure no one touched her. Staying in the room and bathroom with her had pissed me off at first, but I understood.

It wasn’t until a few hours after we’d finished eating that I had to use every ounce of self-control so I wouldn’t lash out for what Rachel saw one night in the bathroom, and for the two kisses they had shared. Rachel explained both kisses as: “We thought we were about to die, we didn’t know what we were about to walk out of that room and into. He’d taken care of me, killed his ‘brothers’ for me, put himself in danger for me and was about to willingly do it again.” All I could think of as she’d explained the kisses was, You were still engaged!

I couldn’t imagine kissing another woman in any situation, let alone that one. Rachel must have seen that thought repeating itself, because she looked directly into my eyes and whispered, “You weren’t there for all of it. So don’t judge me, because there is no way you could understand why it happened, or why I let it happen.”

When she was done with her story, she started picking at the bottom of her shirt and refused to look at me again; and I just didn’t know what to say.

So I didn’t say anything.

We sat there silently for another hour as she looked at everything but me, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

I wasn’t sure if I was happy I knew now, or not. At least some of the images I had been visualizing had been put to rest. If she said that was all that happened between them on a romantic or sexual level, then I believed her . . . completely. But that didn’t make what had happened any easier.

I knew that Rachel believed she didn’t have romantic feelings for Trent . . . but there was something. I could see even as she told me about her time when she was gone, the way she talked about him changed. Scared of him, to confused about him, to grateful for him, to viewing him as friend, to viewing him as something else entirely. Only problem was she didn’t even realize that final change; and I didn’t have a name for it.

From what she had said, she’d wanted to get out of there and get back to me, and Trent was going to help her. And after watching the way she continued to avoid eye contact or slowly inch away from me, I stopped wondering why she would be doing that after so long apart if she wasn’t actually in love with Trent.

Because I knew the reason now.

Just like I’d envisioned a reunion with her that was completely different from the one we’d had. She’d been dreaming of me rescuing her and taking her away from it all. And instead, I’d let my jealousy get in the way and had been a bastard to her the entire first day after the supposed bad guy had just done everything to save her.

Strike. Three.

Rachel

I COULDN’T FIGURE OUT WHAT TO SAY or what to feel when I finally finished rehashing everything I could think of from my time with Trent.

Now I was sitting here, trying to sort through all the emotions that were coursing through me. I knew the members of his gang would kill Trent the second they had the chance, and I was feeling guilty and terrified for when that time came . . . it felt like I was already grieving his loss. I’d promised him I wouldn’t let him go down for everything, and in the end, I hadn’t been able to do a thing about it. I wanted him back; I wanted him safe and away from the other members of his gang. I wished more than anything that he could have gotten a start at a new life instead of being sent to prison, where he was likely to die for what he’d done for me. But through all of that—through all of those emotions—they didn’t compare to what I was feeling for the man sitting across from me.

I was so confused. I had no idea what he was thinking or feeling for me after the conversation I’d heard yesterday afternoon. I’d always known he was quick to react on his emotions, it was one of the reasons I loved him. But everything about yesterday and today was so beyond what I thought it would be, and what was us, that I just felt like I didn’t know anything anymore.

So I was grieving, but it wasn’t just for Trent and what was to come for him, it was also for the relationship that I was afraid was now over after everything Logan and I had been through.

When more than an hour had passed since I’d finished talking, and he still hadn’t said a word, I stood up to take a shower.

“What can I do, Rachel?” he asked to my back. “Tell me what to do for you and I’ll do it. Tell me how to help you and it’ll be done.”

My lips tilted up in a forced, helpless smile even though he couldn’t see me, and I kept my back to him as I said, “If I had any idea what to do to make that month go away, or to fix us, I would. But I don’t, I don’t even know if there is anything either of us can do.”

Without waiting for a response, I walked to the back of the house and through the bedroom to the bathroom. Stripping down after the steam from the shower started filling up the room, I stepped in and let the hot water soothe my aching body, and hide my unrelenting tears.

Logan never came to check on me, though I stayed in long enough again that the water ran cold. But when I was in new pajamas and was walking out of the bathroom again, something on the bed caught my eye.

My engagement ring was on top of the same piece of paper I had left it on this morning, sitting in the middle of the bed.

I sat on the edge and reached for the paper, letting the ring slide off it onto the comforter.

I understand, and I don’t blame you. I’m sorry.

I’m here. Always. And I’m never giving up on us. I love you.

“So fall when you’re ready, babe . . .”

Somehow, impossibly, more tears filled my eyes, and I pressed the paper to my chest as I fell back onto the bed. Grabbing my engagement ring, I held it above me and stared at it through blurred eyes as I replayed yesterday, then replayed the first and second times Logan sang “Fall into Me” by Brantley Gilbert to me. It was after our first time together, and then again as he danced with me in my kitchen last fall on the anniversary of my parents’ death.

I loved him. I loved the man that was waiting for me somewhere in the house. I loved the way he loved me, and I loved all his faults. Including his quick reactions based solely on emotions rather than on facts.

But the events of the last month wouldn’t just go away. Just like the horrific night with Blake hadn’t gone away overnight. Logan was right about one thing, I was sure of it. I wasn’t the same Rachel as before, and I didn’t know how to get her back. Because this time, it wasn’t just the events that had changed me . . . it was also Trent, and he had changed Logan too.

Logan didn’t understand my relationship with Trent, and I wasn’t sure if he understood now that I wasn’t in love with him. But for Logan, there was still that level of unease and suspicion when it came to Trent, and that needed to be addressed, just as much as I needed to work my way through all that had happened before Logan and I could move forward.

Sitting back up, I opened the drawer of my nightstand and kept both the note and ring in my left hand, suspended over it, as I thought of the past . . . the future . . . and most importantly, the present. What happened here and now could change everything.

Letting the note fall, I shut the drawer and stood to leave the room.