The Vargas Cartel Trilogy (Vargas Cartel #1-3)(60)

I was so f*cked up. I wanted him. I hated him. Even nameless and unspoken, he infiltrated my body like a parasite, weaving his way into my brain. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

The way he smelled.

The way his velvety voice sent tremors down my spine.

The way it felt as he slid inside of me.

Pain cleaved through my chest as I strangled in the prison of my self-pity. This was harder than I’d thought. If I’d known returning to my real life was going to be so hard, I would’ve refused to leave the Vargas Cartel compound.

Bang.

Bang.

“Hattie,” Evan hollered as he knocked on the bathroom door.

Go away.

Go away.

I held my breath, not making a sound, not moving an inch.

Leave me alone.

Bang.

“Hattie?” He yelled my name like a curse. Maybe I was cursed. I felt doomed. Doomed to a life of tragedy.

I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. “Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

I wished everyone would stop asking me that question. They wanted me to say yes. They expected me to say yes, but part of me wanted to tell the truth. I’d never be okay. I stopped being okay the minute I walked into that bar in Mexico…maybe before that.

“I’m fine,” I answered instead. Nobody wanted the truth. The truth was ugly. I was lost. The Hattie I knew a couple of months ago had disappeared. No matter how many times I tried to pull my life together, I couldn’t. Too many pieces of the puzzle were missing.

His feet shifted on the hardwood floors outside the door and the floor creaked.

“I made breakfast.” I didn’t respond. “Yogurt with chia seeds and fruit.”

“Oh. Okay. Thanks,” I said, wiping my nose with a tissue. I couldn’t believe he knew what I liked for breakfast. We had lived together for two years, and he hadn’t acknowledged my preference once.

The door handle rattled. “Will you unlock the door? You’re scaring me.”

My gaze dropped to the stick in my hand. Shit. I surged to my feet and tossed the stick along with the folded directions back into the box. I rolled it inside a towel and hid it in the cabinet under the sink.

If Evan found it, I would have a lot of explaining to do. I hadn’t let him so much as kiss me on the lips since I moved back into his apartment the day after we flew back from Mexico. He slept on the pull out sofa bed every night, and I slept in the bedroom. He’d know the pregnancy test didn’t have anything to do with him.

“Sorry,” I mumbled as I cracked the door a few inches. Evan was fully dressed, his sandy brown hair perfectly gelled, and his jaw shaved with military precision.

The faint smile on his face evaporated. “Have you been crying?”

I glanced at the floor and rubbed my temples with my fingertips. My head throbbed from a combination of sleepless nights and nonstop bickering with Evan. “No. Not really.”

“Hattie,” Evan cautioned, closing his hands around my upper arms. I jerked away before I could stop my reaction. I didn’t want his hands on me. I never wanted his hands on me.

“I’m fine. Okay. Stop looking at me like I’m going to break.”

He raked his hands through his hair, and his eyebrows knitted in confusion. Then, he shook his head, and his face hardened into a cold mask. “Jesus, Hattie. This is getting old. You flinch if I touch you. You still won’t let me sleep in the bed with you. You turn to the side when I try to kiss you. You treat me like a stranger. What the hell? How long are we going to play this game?”

I slipped by him and walked to the kitchen. “What game?” I asked without glancing over my shoulder.

“You won’t tell me anything about what happened, which is fine. I get it. You’re still not ready to trust me, but you haven’t told your therapist anything either.”

I spun on my heel, my hair whipping the side of my face. Fear and anger skittered down my spine. “How the hell would you know what I tell my therapist?”

He held out his hands in front of him in mock surrender. “I don’t. She hasn’t told me anything except that you haven’t opened up to her. That you’ve spent every session feeding her a bunch of uninformative answers.”

“There’s nothing to tell.” My hands shaking, I lifted the coffee carafe and poured the dark liquid into a mug. “You know what happened. I was abducted, and now I’m home. That’s it. Sitting in a room, dissecting every detail with a stranger won’t miraculously heal me.”

He slapped his hand against the countertop, rattling my coffee mug. “Dammit, Hattie. If you didn’t have anything to tell, you wouldn’t be acting like this.”

I focused on the television streaming the morning news across the room. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t take this anymore. Every morning and every night we had the same conversation. It was an endless loop, replaying over and over. “It’s only been two weeks. Can’t you give me time to process everything that’s happened? When I’m ready, I’ll talk. I promise.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and then whispered, “I’m trying. I really am. Don’t give up yet.”

He leaned his hips against the kitchen counter and sighed. “Okay. You’re right. I won’t push you. I promised we’d work through this together and we will.”