Built (Saints of Denver #1)(44)

We made the rest of the trip in relative silence. I decided it was for the best to let Poppy work through what she was thinking and feeling on her own while Salem and Rowdy carried on a low-voiced conversation in the front of the vehicle. Feeling the oppression of everyone else’s emotions made my skin too tight and the air in the car thick and heavy. I turned my phone back on and gave an audible sigh because even though I didn’t want to feel, I did, and I was relieved that there was a missed text message from Zeb on the screen. All it said was:

See you on Monday.

But it was enough to loosen the tightness in my chest and to have the air trapped in my lungs moving more freely.

I couldn’t decide what to send back to him. Everything I thought of seemed too personal, too involved, so I decided on:

Yes you will.

I left it at that and focused on spending the weekend with my family and appreciating the fact that we were growing and getting more people to love and protect. It took Poppy the rest of the ride, checking into the swanky hotel and spa, getting settled into the room we were sharing, to break free from the zombielike state she had been in.

Once we were alone in the room she sank to the edge of the bed, looked me dead in the eye, and told me about the baby she had lost when she was just a teenager. I knew she and Rowdy had been close when they were younger, but I hadn’t known my brother fancied himself in love with the wrong Cruz sister for most of his youth. He was so convinced that Poppy was the one that he followed her to college and then had lost his scholarship when he attacked the father of Poppy’s unborn baby because the guy had hurt her and caused her to miscarry. After Rowdy left her and school, she moved back home to her parents because she was alone and afraid, which then ultimately led to her ending up in the abusive hands of her ex. The poor thing had been abused by more than one man who claimed to love her, which made her hesitation around the opposite sex all the more clear to me as the words came pouring out of her.

It all came out in a rush that was flavored with hiccuping sobs and a torrent of tears. I knew she was shaken up when I sat next to her on the bed and she actually allowed me to put my arm around her shoulders and comfort her. I wanted to cry, too, but instead I made soothing noises and told her everything would be all right. I offered comfort to my clients in a professional capacity all the time. This was the first time in my life I wanted to open myself up and offer comfort and reassurance on a personal level. I wanted her to know I was there for her beyond a roof over her head and a safe place to stay. I wanted her to know I cared, and that stunned me so much that we were both shaking as we huddled together and let our emotions run their course.

I wasn’t sure how long we stayed like that, but when it was all out of her she pushed her caramel-colored hair out of her face, took a deep breath, and told me she needed to get cleaned up so she could go and tell Rowdy and Salem she really was happy for them. I nodded and took a minute to get myself back under control.

Poppy seemed weak and fragile on the outside, but she never stopped fighting, never gave up when all the bad things from the past tried to drag her down. She felt everything so fully, so intensely, that it paralyzed her with the force of it and I had to admire that. Instead of dealing with the entanglements and thorns that pricked at me from before, I denied feeling anything. I shut myself down and closed myself off so that there wasn’t the kind of pain Poppy was dealing with. She was a thousand times stronger than I would ever be.

Rowdy and I decided to leave Poppy and Salem alone to have a heart-to-heart, which meant we ended up in the bar with a couple of frosty craft beers and some tortilla chips and green chili in front of us. It took exactly five minutes of small talk before Rowdy laid into me about what was really going on with Zeb.

“So you want to tell me what’s really up with you and Paul Bunyan? I mean I know you’re helping him out with his kid but there’s more going on there, isn’t there?”

I snapped a chip in half with my teeth and narrowed my eyes at him, and only partly because he called Zeb by such a ridiculous nickname. Sure the guy was big and looked like he could fell an entire forest with one swing of his ax, but he was far too handsome and far too well-spoken to get saddled with the silly moniker. “What makes you say that?”

“Besides the fact that you were checking your phone every five minutes in the car, how about when I called him last night to see if he wanted to go get a beer at the Bar and he told me he couldn’t because you were coming over to help him work on his latest flip. You aren’t exactly handy, Sayer. You had to call me to come hang all the pictures and curtains up in your house when he was finished with the remodel, so that tells me ‘work’ probably means something else.”

I groaned a little and picked up my beer. “I don’t know what I’m doing or what any of it means. I’m deeply invested in helping Zeb get full custody of his son and that’s all it should be. Anything else involving me and him is a terrible idea. Honestly, I have no clue what to do with him outside of the courtroom, so I’m pretending nothing is going on in between bouts of throwing myself at him and running away.”

He snorted at me and picked up his own beer. “How’s that working out for you?”

I scowled because there was humor laced liberally through his tone. “Not very well.”

“Because it’s been brewing from the very beginning. Zeb has been interested in you since day one; it just took you a while to recognize it. Once you did there was no way in hell that he was going to let you ignore it.”