Accidental Knight: A Marriage Mistake Romance(68)

12





Honest Mistakes (Drake)





Ignoring this strange, sweet, wildcat of a woman is damn near impossible.

I’d have an easier time ignoring a black bear tearing apart my truck from the inside out than ignoring Bella Reed.

Even when she’s not in sight, she’s up in my head, including while I’m asleep.

Hell, maybe especially while I’m asleep.

Those dark-green eyes of hers haunt me right out of bed and into a cold shower earlier and earlier every morning.

“I mean it, Drake, you either come clean, or...or I’ll sign it all over to my parents.”

I usually don’t respond to threats, and shouldn’t this time when I know she’s bluffing.

If those green eyes weren’t shimmering like tears about to burst, I’d walk away.

Actually, I still should. This has already gotten too deep. Too convoluted.

I gave Jonah my word I’d help, and I have, but how much fucking punishment can one man take?

“Your choice, darlin’, and yours alone,” I say. “Always has been. Obviously, I hope you won’t.”

The hurt on her face guts me.

It shouldn’t.

I can’t afford to care. Not now. Not ever. Not again.

“Fine. Thanks for showing me what an idiot I’ve been.” She marches past me and out the door.

I watch her cross the entryway and head into the living room, telling myself to go back outside.

She’s not going to sign anything. I huff out a breath.

Nothing about this is going to change, either. I’m the only one who can make that happen.

Fuck.

I follow her path, all the way into the kitchen. She stops at the table and picks up her phone.

“You want to know the real reason I’m doing all this?” I ask.

“No.” She punches a button. “Not anymore.”

I have no idea who she might be calling, nor should I care.

But I do. That’s the pure hell of it.

Pressing one hand against the curved archway dividing the kitchen from the living room, I brace for my own sucker punch. “It’s because I failed. I failed my father. I failed my sister. I fucked up and failed my niece and nephew, Bella.”

Sucking in a breath, I don’t say Winnie. Not out loud.

Don’t need to. That failure might just be the worst of all, and it’s forever embedded in my soul.

Blinking, she lowers the phone from her ear and punches another button.

“Look, dammit. I know this won’t make up for that, my demons, but maybe some part of me hopes.”

“Hopes what?” Her voice softens. “I’m listening.”

“That by helping you, by fulfilling Jonah’s wishes, I’m able to repay him a fraction for helping me when I needed it. I couldn’t make the others square, it was too damn late. But your grandfather, maybe.”

“I don’t understand. How did he help you?”

“By being a damn good friend when I needed one. A 'helper,' as he liked to call it. On paper, that old man hired me to look after him and this place, but it was the opposite in the beginning. He saved me, Bella. Saved me from myself, from being eaten up with so much reckless guilt I would’ve died of frostbite or something worse a long time ago. And that’s what he wanted me to be for you, too. A friend when you need one the most.”

She’s looking at me, waiting for more, because she knows there’s plenty. She’s right.

There’s a hell of a lot more to it than that, but there are things I can’t tell her, won’t tell her. “I’d been out of the Army for some time when I blew that tire by the mailbox. In a lot of ways, I was still going through withdrawals ever since I came home to the States. Not from drugs, but from a life I’d known for years. The only life I’d ever known as a grown man. When my tour ended and I didn’t re-up for a third, I thought I was ready to come home to Montana, pick up where things were when I left. But things weren’t the same and neither was I.”

“I’m sure you weren’t,” she whispers. “I’ve heard it can do that. War, I mean...”

“Jonah said that’s how it was for him, too, when he’d come home from Korea. We did a lot of talking those first few days. Having been there himself, he could explain shit I thought no one could relate to.” Those conversations will always be private, but they’d healed me in ways I hadn’t known I even needed to be healed. I’d told him about the war, about my old man, and about Winnie, how she’d deserved to be more than an unsolved mystery, and that I’d come to North Dakota for justice.

“Well, I’m glad he was able to help you,” Bella tells me.

“Me too,” I admit. Weak fucking words.

If not for Jonah, I have no doubt I’d be in jail right now. My anger was so raw, so all encompassing, I’d wanted to kill someone. I wanted to find the Dragon and slaughter him in cold blood.

“I owe Jonah a whole hell of a lot, no surprise. That’s why I’m doing this, Bella. Because I can’t walk away and turn my back on the only man who ever set me straight again.”

She gets up then, walks to the fridge, and pulls out two waters. I take a bottle when she crosses the room and hands it to me, a strange reversal of our first night together in this place.