Page 23 of Hideaway Whirlwind (Big Boys of Berenson Trucking #4)

Teagan

Elliott reluctantly pulls out of me and rolls off, gathering me close so we’re lying on our sides, chest to chest. “Why can’t you stay?” He presses a kiss to my forehead, caressing my hip, my thigh, my waist.

I tip my head back and lay my hand on his cheek, lightly playing with his beard for the last time. He’s so handsome. So wonderful. So confused. “This was only ever temporary. I was always going to leave once the freeze was over,” I say quietly. “You knew that.”

“It doesn’t have to be temporary,” this big, brutal man says with a hitch in his voice, kissing the tip of my nose when I dip my chin. “We could be a family.” He slips his hand between us to lay his palm flat against my stomach. “It already feels like we are.”

My heart thumps hard at that—what a dream it would be.

And that is precisely why I have to say, “No. No, I can’t do this again.

” I push his hand away and roll onto my back out of his hold, swallowing the shrill note that creeps into my voice.

When Elliott reaches for me, I finish rolling off the bed, squeezing my thighs together and searching the dark for my clothes.

“Do what?” Elliott is out of bed, standing between me and the door.

It’s a straight shot of adrenaline into my veins when he crowds me against the mattress, taking the T-shirt I’d found and balling it up to throw it across the room, preventing me from getting dressed.

“Move out of my way,” I demand with an icy tone.

Wounded, Elliott takes a small step back, his face a mask of sorrow in the moonlight. “Birdie, please.”

“No!” I snap, breaking inside, hating how upset I am that he’s upset, and that it’s all my fault. I rush to pull on my clothes and leave so he can’t drag me into bed again…not that I would necessarily hate it, which is all the more reason to leave.

Elliott hurries to get dressed in a T-shirt and sweatpants so he can follow on my heels out of the bedroom, as he’s been doing ever since Davis came and went. Instead of going to the spare bedroom, where he would follow me inside and might wake the kids, I head for the living room.

“Please answer my question.”

I spin and hold my hand out to stop him. “I won’t fall for another man’s lies and let him trap me again! I won’t do it!”

“I’m not lying. This isn’t a trap. It’s us. We’re good together.”

“We’re not together,” I say with a shake of my head, crossing my arms, straining to lift my mental shield back up.

His mouth drops open several times before he says, “I don’t understand. You came to me every night. Every night, Birdie.”

“To thank you, that’s it,” I say, though it doesn’t completely ring true .

It’s as if Elliott hits an invisible wall, rocking back on his bare feet. “To thank me? With sex ?” he stresses, horror draining the sex-induced warm flush from his cheeks. “You never wanted me. It was just…some kind of payment?”

“Yes. You knew that.” Didn’t he ? Didn’t I ?

Elliott shakes his head fast, backing away. “No. No, I didn’t. I never would have let you thank me like that.”

My stomach hollows as I start second-guessing myself, not as confident in my assertions when I say, “But you…the way you look at me when I put the kids to bed each night…”

“What look?” he asks, bewildered.

“Expectant.” I motion to the hallway. “You waited up for me every night.”

“You thought—” Elliott rushes past me to throw himself out the back door and jump down the stairs. He clutches his middle, doubles over, and heaves into a dead bush gone scraggly with the freeze along the siding. “No,” he says, gasping for breath when he’s finished, a vein bulging at his temple.

The chill sets in the longer we’re outside, and I hug myself, rubbing my arms as my teeth start to chatter. “But—”

“I never expected sex. I wanted you, Birdie. I wanted you, all of you , not just your body.” The next look he gives me is one as if I’ve stabbed him in the heart and twisted the knife, and he asks in the most tormented voice I’ve ever heard, “Did you have to force yourself to have sex with me?”

“Not after the first time,” I say quietly. “I wanted to after that.” More than that, I secretly looked forward to it. Craved it. Craved him . Never wanted the night to end.

My admission does nothing to ease his agony, and Elliott doubles over again. When he stands and swipes the back of his hand across his mouth, I shove the knife in deeper, as much into myself as him. I have to. He needs to know that there can never be an us .

“But that doesn’t mean I want to be in a relationship,” I tell him.

The fact that it doesn’t ring true, either, as I consider what a life would be like with Elliott—if who he has presented himself to be is, in fact, the real him—is terrifying.

I have to break the pattern that my mom started and I’ve followed, if not for myself, then for Sydney and Kendall.

Tears roll down Elliott’s colorless face into his beard. He nods once, then turns and walks away, picking up the pace until he’s full-on running across the yard into the woods.

“Elliott,” I call out, rushing down the stairs. “Wait!” He’s not wearing any shoes or socks, and his thin T-shirt isn’t enough to keep him warm. “Elliott!”

I make it to the treeline, tripping over a branch I hadn’t seen in the dark, crashing shoulder-first into a tree trunk.

I will my eyes to hurry up and adjust as I look left and right, even turning in a circle, taking two more precarious steps in my socks that are already soaked through with slush, my feet turning numb.

But it’s as if Elliott has become one with the night, as big and still and silent as the trees.

“Come back! Elliott, please!” My voice grows quieter, my throat raw. “Please, come back,” I can barely say at last, shivering so hard that it twists my stomach, and I think I’m going to throw up, too. I didn’t mean for it to happen this way. For any of this to happen.

When I completely lose feeling in my feet, I finally trudge back to the cabin and give the woods one last sweeping glance from the deck, holding my breath as I listen for the sound of his footsteps or heavy breathing.

But all I hear is the whistle of the wind and the slow-moving, thawing creek.

“Please, come back,” I whisper, tears frozen to my cheeks as I think about what could happen to Elliott with hardly a stitch of clothing on if he doesn’t come home soon. “Please.”

Storm scratches at the door, and I finally turn my back to let her out of the cabin.

Instead of bounding down the steps to use the restroom, she faces the yard and barks a few times, waits, then barks again.

When nothing answers her back, she sits and stares up at me, cocking her blocky head to the side.

“I messed everything up,” I tell her, stroking her ears. I can’t leave my babies to follow Elliott into the woods and force him to come back home, if I were even able to find him, which I doubt I could. And I have no way of calling anyone for help, either.

Storm noses my hand, then trots into the cabin.

I follow her inside and down the hallway, where she circles her puppies in the second spare bedroom.

So I do the same, climbing into bed with my babies and throwing my arm over them.

They’re my whole world and the very reason why I can’t let myself get sucked into anything that could threaten the future I want to give them.

Now that they’ve started, the tears won’t stop coming. My babies and I are safe and warm and comfortable while Elliott is out there, alone in the dark, and it’s all my fault. It always is .

Elliott

Birdie’s fading voice is like jagged glass shredding me from the inside out as I push deeper into the woods, and I only stop moving when she stops calling out for me.

As much as I’d like to keep walking and never look back, never have to face her or reality ever again, I simply can’t.

Not when she’s still outside, exposed, and hurting—even if she hurt me first.

Hardly lifting my feet from the ground when I return to the treeline in a crouch so as not to make any noise, I watch Storm come outside and bark a few times before nudging Birdie into the cabin.

Only then do I sit with my back against a tree trunk, ignoring the cold that burrows deep into my bones and black heart.

I unlock my phone and open my photos app, tap select, then tap on every single picture I’ve taken since meeting Birdie.

I even go so far as to hover my finger over the trash can icon to delete the pictures.

But no matter how much I argue with myself that I should get rid of them for my own good and forget about the little family I’ve come to think of as mine, I can’t do it.

I can’t do anything but torture myself, once again, by replaying every interaction Birdie and I have had, seeing them all in a new light.

She wasn’t lying to me or herself when she said nothing was real. I just hadn’t wanted to believe it.

Though I have nothing left in my stomach, I twist sideways to heave again, thinking of what it must have felt like for Birdie to go through with having sex with me when she didn’t want to. How disgusting and traumatizing that must have been.

I was so delusional. A downright fool. I bought into the mythical whirlwind bullshit that everyone espouses and thought I had been lucky enough to be chosen.

That Birdie had been chosen for me. I’m old enough to know better.

Nothing and no one would ever choose me after what I’ve done. Not even myself.