The Perception Read online

“I need some exercise. Maybe we can go hiking today?” I suggested, figuring that getting him to agree on an activity would put off the conversation to another day.

  He smirked. “Exercise sounds right up my alley.”

  “You mean the dancing on stage last night wasn’t enough for you?”

  “It was a means to an end,” he winked. “Speaking of last night, did ya have fun? I know Brielle kinda gave you the cold shoulder. I don’t know what her deal is.”

  “I don’t know why she doesn’t like me, but it’s probably just because I’m with her big brother.”

  Max watched me hesitantly. “What did you think of Sam?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say much to me because she was too busy watching you.”

  He blew out a breath. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “Okay.”

  I watched him figure out how to say whatever was on his mind. I got the distinct impression that I wasn’t going to be a huge fan of whatever it was.

  “Lucy asked for some time off and Cane let her have it. Neither of us are fans of temps,” he said warily.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Sam asked me for a job last night.”

  I gave him a look. Whatever I thought he was going to say—this. Was. Not. It.

  “I didn’t say yes or no, just that I would think about it.”

  “She wants you,” I said matter-of-factly, cutting to the chase.

  “And I,” he said, kissing me on the lips, “want you.” I tried to pull him to me for more, but he chuckled and backed away. “If you say that this will bother you, I’ll tell her no. You come first, Kari. But,” he took his hat off and ran his hand through his hair before looking at me again, “I would like to do this for her.”

  “Why?”

  He looked to the ceiling and then back to me again. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I just do.”

  I remembered what Cane had alluded to the night before and a sick feeling rolled through my stomach.

  Maybe it’s time to get to the bottom of this . . .

  I quirked an eyebrow. “You just do?”

  He blew out a breath. “Yeah. Will you accept that?”

  “You know, Cane said something last night and it made me curious. He said you feel obligated to her ‘considering the circumstances.’ What does that mean?”

  He ran his hands up and down his thighs. “It’s a long story.”

  I wasn’t used to seeing Max look nervous and it wasn’t like him to not just be forthright with me. It only increased my curiosity and left me feeling unsettled. “I have time,” I said softly.

  He bowed his head, his shoulders slumped. He stayed that way for a minute before clearing his throat and turning towards me, his gaze staying on a picture on the wall.

  “If I tell you this, you have to promise me something, alright?”

  I nodded, feeling more unsure about the whole thing as each second passed.

  He turned to face me, his eyes filled with something I couldn’t pin point. Sorrow? Fear? Anger? It all seemed to be there, floating and mixing together and it caused those same feelings to rise inside me.

  “You know that look you give me,” he said, his voice soft, “when it’s just the two of us? I’ve never had someone look at me the way you do. It’s like . . . It’s like you think I could do anything. Like I could hang the damn moon.”

  “You could,” I whispered.

  He shook his head sadly. “Please don’t change that. I never want that look in your eyes to go away. It’d kill me, alright?”

  I nodded. Our eyes fixed together, I rose and kissed him gently on the cheek. “I don’t know how I’d ever see you for anything but what you are. And that’s a kind, good man.”

  “Damn it,” he muttered, taking off his cap and tossing it onto the chair by the door. Titus popped his head up and looked at us, startled by the sudden movement.

  “Alright. I might as well go ahead and do this.” He let a breath whistle through his teeth. He nodded, like he came to some sort of agreement with himself. “Sam’s been around my whole life. She has a way of, I don’t know, putting people off. She didn’t have a lot of friends besides Brielle and her immediate little click.”

  “I can see why,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.

  “I was kind of her big brother growing up in a way, too,” he continued, ignoring me. “She just had her mom and she worked a lot and I think she drank a lot, too, so our family became hers in a way. So when she’d get in trouble or need a ride, one of us would give it to her. The older she got, the more she stayed with us. Bri’s room was half her stuff and half Sam’s by the time I left for college.”

  He stood up and walked in a circle. “One night, when I was at ASU, Sam called me. It wasn’t unusual for her to do that, but I was at a party with Cane.” His eyes darkened, his back stiffening as he relived the story. “I had gone home the weekend before. She and Bri had been out one of the nights and came home. I was the only one up. I think I was studying for a math test or something. Anyway, they had been drinking.”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets and faced me, resolution written across his handsome features. “I lit them up. Not for the drinkin’ part, although they were too young to be doing it, but for the drivin’ part. That’s just a no-go, dumb as shit. I took Bri’s keys and went to my room to get away from them. A few hours later, Sam came into my room and . . .”

  “And what?” I asked, getting the picture this was going to make me hate Sam.

  “She just started babbling in the way only someone drunk can. Telling me she loved me and that she didn’t have anyone that loved her. She had put on this little dress to look cute, I guess, but her arm wasn’t even in one of the straps. She reeked of alcohol and it would’ve been funny if she wasn’t such a mess. I just took her back to Bri’s room and told her to go to bed.”

  “The next morning,” he continued, “she came into my room again. She didn’t remember everything, but enough to know that she made a fool of herself. She just apologized and said she was embarrassed. I understood, I mean, we’ve all had those moments. She promised not to drink and drive again and I blew it all off.”

  “Did she remember professing her love for you?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t bring it up and she didn’t either. She was so out of it that she probably didn’t remember. I figured if she was going to hang around our family, it was best not to bring it back up and make things weird.”

  “So the next weekend, Bri called and asked if I was coming home. I told her I wasn’t. Awhile later, Sam called and asked me to come home that night. I told her I had plans.”

  “Good for you.”

  I smiled to myself, a little relieved, that he had put her in her place. If he was looking for a chance at Sam, that would’ve been the time to take it. But he hadn’t. And that made me overjoyed in the midst of the growing disdain I had for her.

  He laughed sadly. “So Cane and I go to this party, do our thing, drink a little, whatever. I don’t know—I can’t remember much at this point. It’s all kinda a blur. Sam’s number called a couple of times but I ignored it. It just irritated me that my little sister’s friend was blowing up my phone. I always tried to do right by her, but I’d had enough. I just ignored her all night. A few hours later, I got a call from my dad.” He turned away from me. “Sam and Bri were at the hospital.”

  “What? Why?” I asked, trying to figure out how they had ended up there.

  Max was looking at the floor, motionless.

  “They were out doing God knows what and got a flat tire in the country. A couple guys stopped to help them but instead of changing their tire . . .” Max swallowed hard, his jaw working back and forth.

  My breath caught in my throat as I waited for him to continue. He started moving again, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He finally drew his eyes up to mine.

  “Sam was raped.”

  I gasped in horror, my han
d grasping my throat.

  “Brielle wasn’t, thank God. They just kind of tossed her against the car a little.”

  “Max, oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

  “Some guy pulled up on the scene and the guys took off,” he said, not even seeming to register that I had said anything at all.

  “Did they find them?”

  He shook his head and turned to face me. “Nah, they got away with it. The hospital did a rape kit on Sam but neither of them could really give much detail about what the attackers looked like. It was really dark out there, so there wasn’t much to go on.”

  “I am so, so sorry.” I got up and went to him, wrapping my arms around his waist. “I had no idea. Those poor girls.”

  “Yeah. If I would’ve just answered the damn phone, that wouldn’t have happened. It’s my fault.”

  The pain in his voice, all of the emotions I had seen in his eyes earlier now breaking through in his tone, about broke me. I had no idea he was carrying around so much pain, so much guilt. My beautiful, in control, as-sweet-as-he-was-sexy guy was nearly as broken as I was.

  “The hell it is,” I said, refusing to allow him to blame himself. He brushed my hair back and held me tight against him. “It was not your fault. How can you blame yourself?”

  He snorted but didn’t say a word, just held me close for a long time. I finally pulled my head back and looked him in the eye.

  “It wasn’t your fault. There’s no way you could have known what was going to happen.”

  The sparkle in his eyes was gone, the greens cloudy, murky, dull. I’d never seen him like that and it shook me to the core. I wanted to erase his pain, to make him smile. To figure out how to show him the truth.

  He smiled sadly. “I shouldn’t have been a dick and should’ve answered the phone. After the weekend before, I should have—”

  “They weren’t your children, Max! It was your little sister and her friend, not your responsibility! And I can see why you were annoyed with them, especially after the weekend before. Cut yourself some slack.”

  “I’ll never forgive myself for that.”

  My mind swam with ways to convince him it wasn’t his fault. “What happened was a tragedy, but who knows if you would’ve been there in time anyway?”

  “Easy for you to say,” he mumbled. “You didn’t sit in the waiting room, watching your mom cry her eyes out. Watching your dad try to keep his shit together, knowing what could’ve happened to his daughter. You didn’t see the looks in Bri and Sam’s eyes when I went back into their rooms for the first time.”

  His jaw clenched as he worked it back and forth. “You don’t know what it felt like to think I was throwing back beers without a care in the world while my little sister needed me, really needed me, and I was chasing tail with Cane. What does that make me, Kar?”

  “It makes you a human being that was in a bad situation. It makes you a man whose little sister and her friend made a bad decision. It. Wasn’t. Your. Fault.”

  He spun around to face me, looking at me like I didn’t get it, a look of disbelief written across his face.

  “Max, listen to me. You can’t blame yourself for this.”

  He watched me for a minute, his jaw pulsing. “That night messed up so much. You had the physical stuff—the bruises and . . . stuff.” He swallowed roughly. “And Mom and Dad went crazy, into total over-protection mode. Brielle went wild, got into some trouble. I just sat back and watched my whole family start to crash and . . .” He hung his head.

  I reached out and grabbed his arm. “What happened was awful, but everyone seems to be okay now, right?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Bri got through dental school and seems alright. But Sam . . . She doesn’t have anyone to help her. Her mom is pretty much non-existent. Sam says she’s not around much and I know she doesn’t help her. I just feel like I should. Do ya know what I mean?”

  The vacant look in his eye began to float away, hope filtering its way in. “If it’s gonna bother you, I get it and I won’t bring it up again. But I’d like to do this for her.”

  I understood why it meant so much to Max, why he was always going out of his way to help Sam. The thing that had annoyed me was really his way of trying to make up what he deemed to be his failure towards her.

  Even after hearing all of that, I still didn’t trust Samantha. But, I trusted him. And he needed this. “If you want to hire her, go for it, babe.”

  A small smile spread across his lips. “I appreciate this.” He squeezed me again before letting me go.

  “Yeah, well, just make sure she keeps that red lipstick off of you and everything will be fine,” I joked, trying to get some levity back in the conversation.

  Max laughed. “No worries there. Now get ready for some exercise.”

  KARI

  The turn-off for Pinnacle Peak flew by an hour later and I gave Max a look. “Um, you missed your exit.”

  “Nah,” was all he said, humming along to Tim McGraw on the radio. He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel and seemed lost in his own thoughts, effectively ignoring me for the most part.

  “Yeah,” I countered, switching off the radio. “The exit was back there.”

  “The exit I’m looking for is about 3 miles ahead, give or take.” He bit his bottom lip to keep from smiling, but his dimple still shone in his cheek.

  “You’re seriously going to hold me to this?”

  “A deal’s a deal, sweetheart,” he grinned. “I got you locked in and there’s no way you’re getting out of it.”

  “You said we were going hiking!”

  “I never said that,” he laughed. “I said I needed exercise and loading your shit in the back of my truck is going to cause me to break a sweat.”

  “You’re a tricky bastard,” I pretended to pout. I couldn’t let him see the bubble of excitement rising in my core. Living with him would make things so much easier and it was what I really wanted. My opposition to it had been to protect him and my heart. He clearly was pushing for this.

  We drove the rest of the way in a comfortable silence. Max’s happiness at his victory over me creating an undercurrent of warmth in the truck. The sun, which hadn’t been out in a couple of days, was shining brightly.

  Max pulled the truck into my driveway and we went to the door, unlocked it, and walked inside. He disabled the alarm while I looked around, the enormity of the situation slamming into me.

  What am I going to do with all this stuff? We can’t fit it all in his truck. What am I going to do with this house? What about the mortgage? Do I call Dad and list it?

  Oh, hell, I can’t do that! I need to . . .

  “Stop,” he whispered in my ear.

  “Stop what?”

  “Don’t overthink this. I know you’re rolling a thousand things through your pretty little mind right now. We’ll figure it out. Just take it a day at a time, okay?”

  I relaxed, relieved. “Okay. So we are clear that this isn’t permanent?”

  He laughed loudly, turning to walk up the stairs. “Don’t kid yourself, sweetheart. This is as permanent as it gets.” He took the stairs two at a time and disappeared into my bedroom. I followed, each step adding to the dread I felt.

  “I’m overwhelmed,” I muttered, looking at all of the things I owned. “What do I take? How did I accumulate all this stuff?”

  “Just take enough stuff to get ya through the week. We’ll get a U-Haul or something for the rest of the stuff.”

  He was making this too easy. “What if I want to take my bed? What do we do with yours?” I asked, challenging him.

  “I’m not attached to my bed. For all I care, you can sell everything I own and move your shit in, as long as it means you are moving in with it.”

  I turned to face the wall so he wouldn’t see the huge grin on my face. I cleared my throat. “I have some big boxes left in the garage that Jada didn’t use. I’ll go get them. Can you gather my shoes out of the closet?” I asked.

  “You’re wor
ried about your shoes?”

  “I can stay here,” I warned him.

  He saluted me. “Shoes. Check.”

  I laughed and left him to his task while I grabbed the boxes from the garage. I swiped a few pictures I wanted out of the living room and made my way back to the bedroom.

  He was standing outside my closet, his hands on his hips. “Do you even realize how many shoes you have?”

  I nodded. “I do. I know each and every pair, so don’t think about leaving any behind. I’ll know.”

  “For shit’s sake,” he muttered.

  “Excuse me? Did I hear you complain?”

  He took a box and started filling it with shoes, making me laugh. I grabbed another and tossed in some scrubs for work, workout clothes, and lingerie. I opened another and laid a blanket inside. I sat my jewelry boxes and trinkets off my dresser carefully on the material. A pair of sunglasses fell out of a dish and hit the floor, cracking the lens. I tossed it in the trash, the sound getting Max’s attention.

  “What was that?” he asked, nodding at the trash.

  “A pair of sunglasses.”

  “Do you have another pair?”

  “Yeah, those weren’t even mine,” I said, emptying my bedside table into the box.

  “Who do they belong to?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. They were just here a while back.”

  He looked puzzled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I don’t know where they came from. They were on the kitchen counter a few months ago. Jada lived here then and she and I went for a walk. We came home and they were laying on the counter. I saved them in case someone asked if they left them here, but no one did. They look expensive, too, so I’m surprised no one was missing them. It was kind of a joke between us for a while.”

  “That’s weird,” he said, standing up. “I think that’s all the shoes. What else do you wanna take?”

  “Can we take my treadmill? Do you think it’ll fit in your truck?” It was the one thing I missed not having at Max’s. I ran outside when I was there and it was just too hot most days.

  “Yeah, it’ll fit. Want me to take these boxes down now?”

  I nodded, smiling at him. Instead of picking up a box, he walked across the room and stopped a few feet in front of me.