Page 21 of Hideaway Whirlwind (Big Boys of Berenson Trucking #4)

Teagan

“A lot can happen in nine days,” he says, lowering his voice as I grow more flighty, like he’s calming a cornered animal. “Just ask Goldie. She’ll tell you.”

“Tell me what?” Memories push forward of the day Marigold introduced me to her husband when she visited Las Vegas a year after she left.

How envious I was when her husband looked at her like she was the greatest gift to the world.

How ready he looked to murder Colton, the father of her first child, Lily.

Not because Colton was challenging Davis’s ownership of Marigold and Lily, but because Davis was utterly in love with his wife and his adoptive stepdaughter, willing to do literally anything for them.

“She hasn’t told you that Davis was with her when she gave birth right after they met? That they’ve been inseparable ever since?”

“No,” I answer with a whisper. Marigold and I weren’t truly friends when we worked together, merely acquaintances. I never had time or permission to have friends.

“When you see her again, ask her about the whirlwind. Ask my brother’s wife. Ask anyone in this town, and they’ll tell you what happens when you get swept up by it. You can’t escape fate.”

“Fate?” I shiver when Elliott nods and advances again, frozen in place instead of putting more distance between us. “There’s no such thing as fate! None of that is real.”

“It is real.” As soon as I’m within reach, he circles one arm around my waist and slips the other under my blanket.

He pushes up my top to expose my stomach and drops his forehead against my lower abdomen.

“Ask them,” he says, his hot breath fanning across my skin, lowering the shield protecting my heart that’s been harder to carry the more time I spend with him. “It’s real.”

I’ve never experienced anything like this moment. None of my pregnancies have ever been celebrated for the right reasons by the men who created them. To those men, our babies never came to be out of love, as I’d first believed. It was only ever about control.

“Elliott,” I breathe out, slipping my fingers through his hair when he kisses my stomach and hugs my hips. I grip his strands tight and tug his head back, locking eyes with a man I never once could have imagined being swept up with just a week ago. “None of that is real.”

“You’re still lying to yourself.” Elliott surges up with me in his arms and carries me into the cabin. “But I’ll prove it.”

I shake my head furiously when he locks his bedroom door, then sets me down in the middle of his bed. “There’s no such thing as fate.”

“Then tell me why I showed up to your apartment right when you needed me,” he says, tugging my blanket away and pulling my top off.

“That was just…good timing,” I answer, my heart racing.

Elliott kisses down my neck after he lays me back, his beard tickling me in such a way that my toes curl as he lightly drags his face down my torso.

He takes a nipple into his mouth, plumping my breast in his palm until I’m pulling at his hair, begging him to suck it harder, distracted from our conversation as my fever for him burns hotter.

“Tell me why the freak-freeze forced me to bring you home when that’s exactly what I wanted,” he says around my nipple, and I moan.

“Climate change,” I throw out when he peels my sweatpants and socks off and releases the barest of chuckles. I hike my knees up and out as soon as my legs are free, welcoming him between my thighs when he shucks off his jacket and pushes his pants down to his knees to free his hard cock.

I’m almost frantic in my desire to have him inside of me, fisting his shaft and lining him up with my entrance.

“Oh fuck, Daddy,” I moan involuntarily when he sits on his heels and lifts my hips to pull me onto his cock.

Elliott hums when I moan for Daddy again, his rumbly voice vibrating through me.

“Tell me why we fit so perfectly together when it should be impossible,” he says gruffly, staring down at where we’re joined and licking his lips.

I have no good answer for that, my eyes rolling back in my head when Elliott lifts my ankles over his shoulders and pumps in and out of me.

“Tell me you want me, Birdie,” Elliott pleads with a whimper, stroking his hands up and down my hips and thighs.

“I want you to make me cum.” I close my eyes against the disappointment reflected in his blues.

“Is that all you want? ”

“Yes!”

“Then you’re still lying,” he says, pulling one leg off his shoulder and pushing my knee up and out so he has room to massage my clit with his thumb.

He doesn’t speak again until he cums after he brings me to an orgasm that is only physically satisfying, nothing more.

“Tell me why all of my tattoos are black and gray except for the raven’s eyes,” he finally says when he slowly pulls out of me, then finishes kicking off his pants and sits on the edge of the bed.

He turns on the nightstand lamp and peers over his shoulder at where I’ve curled up on my side.

His voice is deeper when he says, “Tell me why they’re the same color as yours. ”

I sit up on my knees, pressing them together to contain our mess, and circle the raven’s eyes with my bandaged fingertips. “There’s no way that’s true.” I lean closer to study the colored ink, my stomach fluttering wildly. He’s right.

Elliott stands, then clutches my hand, bringing it to his heart. “And this?”

The year I was born . I hadn’t noticed the small script in the middle of so much dark ink.

My eyes fly wide, colliding with his. “Why did you get this tattoo?”

Elliott’s jaw falls open twice, fear of something flashing behind his eyes. “Don’t be scared. You never have to be scared of me.”

I’m already shaking, though I don’t try to pull away, wanting—no, needing —to know the truth.

“It’s the year my parole ended when I was legally allowed to leave the state. I could have come to you whenever you needed me.”

This time, I do snatch my hand away, climbing over the opposite side of the bed to put it between us. “You’ve been to prison?”

He nods, rubbing his chest, circling the bed, and backing me into the corner.

Elliott

“Why were you in prison?” Birdie asks, her eyes as wide as saucers, losing the blush that had colored her cheeks with her orgasm.

I knew I’d have to come clean eventually, but I was hoping for a little more time. “Thirty years ago, I killed a man.”

Birdie gasps, shrinking away from me. “Why?”

I kneel so as not to tower over her and scare her further, since the story I have to share will do the job well enough.

“My wife…” I clear my throat, my chest burning as I think of her.

“I met her during her senior year of college while I was in the academy to become a deputy, and we—” I have to stop, fighting to gather myself as I think about the past I’ve been running away from for over half my life.

“We couldn’t wait. We married right before her graduation and were going to start trying for a family.

” My stomach clenches as I remember the day she told me she had stopped taking her birth control.

“We were going out for one last drink before we got serious about our health.” I drop my hand down to pat my stomach.

Meredith would have lovingly chided me about my weight, then encouraged me to run a few more miles with her.

“The name you have tattooed on your leg—your wife’s name,” she says with a nod as if she has the answer to an unspoken question.

“We were about to pull into the bar’s parking lot when one of the town drunks got behind the wheel and lost control of his truck. He was going so fast that when he T-boned her side of our car, it flipped. Meredith was killed on impact. Both vehicles totaled.”

Birdie’s shoulders cave in, and she lifts her hand toward my cheek, but tucks it back against her chest. “All those scars? They’re from the accident?”

“Some. Not all.”

“What happened?”

“The drunk got out of his truck, took one look at me, and ran,” I say, my voice turning hard, my index finger curling over a phantom trigger.

“And…?” she asks with reservation, as if she doesn’t really want to know.

“And I shot him.” Memories of Curtis’s blood splattering the pavement assault me.

“He’d been my friend in high school, and everyone knew he had a drinking problem.

He was waiting for a bed to open up at a rehab.

Wanted to turn his life around. I never gave him the chance.

He was dead before his head hit the ground. ”

Birdie bites her lip, then asks, “But wouldn’t that be…be a crime of passion?”

“That’s what my lawyer argued, and maybe it would have worked, but…” I take a long, deep breath as I try to cut through the memories of what it felt like to kill the man who stole my wife’s life and our future together. “I shot him in the back when he was running away.”

Birdie crosses her arms over her chest and stomach. “The skull on your back… ”

“That’s where I shot him. It’s his skull. The horror I inflicted.”

More curious than indignant, she asks, “Why aren’t you still in prison? You should have been sentenced to life or…or—”

“Yeah.” It seems neither of us can bear to say the death penalty , which I deserved.

With shame corroding my insides, I tell her, “The judge was a friend of Meredith’s grandparents.

Went easy on me when he shouldn’t have. I was only sentenced to ten years in prison.

” I clear my throat. “But my brother pulled some strings to get me out early.”

“What about the raven?”

“A symbol of death.” I grip Birdie’s naked hips, pulling her closer, nudging her arms out of the way so I can kiss her stomach. “But also new life.”

“No. No, this is crazy!”

“Fate,” I argue.

“It wasn’t fate that made you a murderer or killed your wife!” she yells, trying to dig her blunt talons into my shoulders to push me away.

“You’re right, it wasn’t.” I kiss her from hip to hip, smelling me on her skin. She’s mine, just as I am hers. “But fate stepped in when you needed me and brought me to you.”

“Why me?” she asks as I stroke her naked back. “Why not your wife?”

A tear rolls down my cheek. “I don’t have an answer for that.”

“Yet you still believe in fate. In this hypothetical whirlwind?”

“I do, Birdie.” I roll my eyes up to hers, pleading with her to understand. “It’s real. Tell me—”