Impulsion (Station 32 #1)(88)
She pulled her shoulders back, glared. “I was seventeen, Wyatt. I was scared. I was protecting you. We’ve had this argument. I know I’m wrong. I’ll fix it, as soon as Collin is clear I’m going to fix it.”
“No you wont. Don’t lie to me or yourself.”
She started to argue but he held his hand up. “If you planned to stop the bullshit you would not be adding more to the pile. More to apologize for. If you planned to make it right—me and you would have been on a plane months ago.”
“It had to happen on this stage, the timing was not in my control.”
He cussed as he turned away from her then faced her gain. “You are hurting people you love to satisfy those that could not care less about you. Maybe you have more of your mother in you than you thought.”
She stepped back as if he slapped her. “You can call me anything you want, but don’t you dare compare me to that woman.”
“Then stop acting like her. You’re a grown woman. Stop acting like property.”
The fact that he was right made her feel even more sick, more scared of this weekend. Wyatt may have thought her father was a stand up man, and he was, but Harley didn’t have the same relationship with hers as Wyatt did with Beckett. The thought of letting him down, seeing disappointment in his eyes was painful enough to know that the guilt she would feel down the road when he was gone was worth it.
Wyatt took a deep calm breath. It didn’t settle his anger but it took some tension away. He didn’t want her to leave there scared, make it to where it would be even easier for her mother to get into her to mind. He wanted her to be invincible, the way she always was in his arms, in his world.
“Harley, if you want to be in my world, then you’re going to be in an honest one. I could not stomach the idea of denying you, even hiding you.”
She started to cry. That killed him. Ripped him apart. He pulled her to his chest, rocked her back and forth. “I’m not hiding, I’m protecting,” she said through her tears.
His hands eased down her hair, his lips brushed across her forehead. He leaned her back, cupping her face in his hands as his thumbs gently stroked her cheeks.
“I know you are, baby. I know you think you are. I just don’t want you to say or do anything you’re going to regret one day. We only have so many chances to tell the truth before there are no more. You’re safe here. You’re strong. Plotting your plan from here seems simple. Easy. But it’s going to feel different there. In that world. It will drown you. All the things that seem ridiculous here will mean something there; they will make you think that it does. For all you know, some other plan will come up, some other story that has to be told.” He dipped his head so his eyes met hers. “If you promise me that you will think and act for yourself, if you will say and do what you can live with for the rest of your life…then I’m good. I can wait right here for you.”
“You’re not mad?”
“I’m furious, but that’s my right, Harley.”
Her eyes searched his looking for a solution, failing to see it through her emotions as she stood at this crossroads in her life, between two worlds.
He felt her weaken in his arms, even tremble. “I respond to you, Harley, in every way. I feel you inside of me. I know this is killing you and that is why it’s pissing me off. This is one party, one charade. It’s nothing compared to what I’ve overcome. I think its stupid and I had a right to tell you. Simple as that.”
“We. We overcame it.”
“We did…” His thumb brushed away another tear, then he pulled her to his lips, gave her the deepest kiss he could. His mind kept flashing back to the last time she’d left this farm, the kiss he had given her then. He told himself it wasn’t the same. She was coming back. No matter what they said or did, she was a grown woman and she was coming back.
He put his arm around her and guided her to the open door of the town car, eased her in. He leaned in, met Collin’s eyes. “Don’t let that woman hurt my Harley.”
Collin looked him dead in the eye. “We are going to make it right.”
“With a lie. All caught up on the plan now,” Wyatt said just before he leaned down and kissed Harley’s lips once more, wiping another tear away as he leaned away then closed the door.
Collin reached for Harley’s hand. She let him hold it, but she stared out her window, never said a word on the entire flight. She kept hearing everything Wyatt had said, lingering words that Camille had said to her, even ones that her father had said in the past.
That sick feeling never left.
Chapter Nineteen
“What the hell are you doing?” Camille said to her son when she found him leaning against the fence, staring down at the long driveway.
“Getting ready to help Dad in the hay fields.”
“That’s going to be hard to do when you’re on a flight.”
He jerked his head to the side.
“Harley and her friends might be fine with lying to her father, but I didn’t raise a liar.”
He wasn’t all that sure what his mother knew about this deal, but assumed that she knew more than she had led on, like always. At the very least she knew that Harley was going to this party with Collin, the boy that all the articles had said she was with.