Page 7 of Hideaway Whirlwind (Big Boys of Berenson Trucking #4)

Teagan

Cuddling Kendall in bed with the covers pulled up to our necks, I press my nose into my shoulder.

I still can’t place the laundry detergent scent on Elliott’s warm flannel, but once I do figure it out, I’ll be switching to it as soon as I get on my feet in Texas and we move out of Marigold’s place into our own.

It’s only been a few hours since Elliott fell asleep, yet he sits up within two seconds of the alarm chiming on his phone, which Sydney and Dustin are watching on my other side.

If I lean over at just the right angle, I can see him cracking his neck from side to side, rolling his big, round shoulders that are twice the width of mine, then stretching his long arms high above his head.

Bracing his hands on his knees, he stands and hikes his waistband up that had fallen dangerously low on his hips, then scratches his strong chest adorned with a huge three-headed hellhound tattoo.

For some reason, at his age, I hadn’t expected him to have tattoos, let alone that he would be covered so completely that he doesn’t have any blank skin other than his hands, feet, neck, and face.

And the tattoos themselves…I shudder, thinking of th e fractured skull with its jaw open wide in horror as a raven plucks one of its bloody eyes out with its beak on his back.

Even though Elliott isn’t bad to look at, his powerful, intimidating size and blank expression scream bad news all on their own.

Add to that, the tattoos scream walking nightmare , and I worry what I’ve gotten my kids and myself into, traveling with and relying on a man like him.

It won’t be for long, though. At least there’s that.

Elliott snaps his dark blue gaze up suddenly, as if he can feel me watching and judging him, and I immediately look away, pretending one of the kids is trying to get my attention.

He pushes open the door to poke his head into my room, staring at the wall above my head with his brows pulled low. “Quick shower, then we gotta go.”

He’s gone before I can respond.

* * *

Four hours later, Elliott switches lanes to take an off-ramp. I lean in between the front seats and tap his arm. “Why are we getting off the highway?”

“Need to gas up and put something with more sustenance in their bellies.” He pauses with a grimace before mumbling, “Mine too.”

I slink back to sit on my heels. “Sorry.” The kids have torn through most of the food Elliott had stocked in his mini fridge and cabinet, leaving not much else for him and me.

“Don’t be,” he says with a tone as if he’s offended as he steers into a truck stop, the roof above the gas pumps tall enough to accommodate his truck. “They need it more than I do. ”

I turn my head away, shame once again threatening to swallow me whole. If I were the kind of mother they need, I would have been able to keep our refrigerator and pantry full to the brim so they could eat as much as they wanted instead of having to be so, so careful with our food budget in Vegas.

“Teagan,” Elliott says after parking his truck and swiveling in his seat. It’s hard to meet his eyes. “Because they’re still growing and I’m not. That’s all I meant. Ok?”

I nod, though nothing about this is ok .

Elliott squares his jaw and stares hard at me for a moment, then finally exits the truck, leaving me to my self-loathing in private. After filling the tank, Elliott backs the truck into one of the slanted parking spots between two parked, darkened rigs.

“Pretty impressive, backing this thing up without crashing into anything,” I say while unbuckling the kids and helping them to stand and stretch.

The tips of Elliott’s ears turn red—flushing, I realize, with my compliment.

So I decide to give him another when he helps me out of the cab by way of asking, “You work out a lot?” Yes, he has a belly he apparently isn’t fond of, but having been half naked at the motel, I’ve seen the evidence of his hard muscles beneath his thick, black and gray tattooed exterior.

Elliott grunts a confirmation, ducking his head shyly, the red bleeding across his cheeks above his beard.

“How much can you lift?” I ask, pulling out my hair tie to finger-comb my messy strands so they’ll hang down my face as a disguise since the truck stop likely has security cameras.

As paranoid as Priscilla is about me snitching, based on the little information I know about her chosen line of work, she’s downright terrified of what her boss would think if she were to leave her safe haven of Nevada to come after us.

I doubt she considers me or Kendall—who she doesn’t actually love or care about—worth risking her life, but one can never be sure.

“At least two hundred,” I guess, since he manhandles me without so much as a grunt. Bully for him.

Elliott’s eyes go straight to my fingers in my hair, the red creeping down his neck. “More,” he says, helping Dustin out next, then Sydney.

“Three?” I ask, my voice lifting. He nods. “Four?” When he nods again, I whistle through teeth starting to chatter with the cold, though my own cheeks grow warm to see him blush. “Impressive.”

I carry my inexplicable giggly mood as easily as Elliott carries Kendall as we speed-walk across the parking lot to the truck stop’s convenience store, the wind whipping diesel fumes and strands of my hair back into a messy nest. We stop at the restrooms first, where I flat out give up hope on detangling my hair, more conspicuous now than if it were in a bun, and I accept defeat, pulling it back.

Then, shockingly, Elliott pulls three twenty-dollar bills out of his wallet and hands one to each of my children, even though he’s carrying a stuffed to-go sack from the attached deli sandwich shop.

“Have at it,” he says to the kids with the tiniest grin, though he does hold Kendall’s hand and helps her with her selections.

I follow behind with my arms crossed, trying to keep an eye on each child, which is impossible with them running around excitedly. “You really don’t have to do that,” I tell him, though I don’t have that kind of cash to spend, either.

Elliott shrugs, opening a cooler on the left to pluck the strawberry and chocolate milk cartons the kids are asking for that are too high up for them to reach. “I want to.”

I scuff the toe of my combat boot on the peeling vinyl tiles. “Marigold told me there’s a diner or something that would hire me. I’ll pay you back when I can.”

I can’t read the thoughts behind Elliott’s blue eyes when he asks, “Granny’s?”

“Who’s Granny?”

“The name of the diner.”

“Oh. Then, yeah.”

His eyes dart down to my chest, his cheeks burning hotter for some reason.

When we get to the checkout counter, I flip the collar of Elliott’s borrowed flannel up and keep my head turned to the side so the cashier—a man almost as big and grizzly as Elliott—won’t see the healing cut on my cheek or the bruises around my neck and start asking questions.

The cashier smiles broadly and produces a plastic fishbowl of lollipops from under the counter, one free for each of the kids.

Missing his right eye with a long-healed scar slashed across it, he winks his left after I remind the kids to say thank you , though they certainly don’t need any more sugar.

“I have seven grandkids about the same age and another one on the way,” the cashier says to Elliott as he scans our goods. “Each of them is a blessing, am I right?”

Elliott stands cold beside me and doesn’t respond.

The cashier grins and waggles a finger at me. “I’m guessing you take after your mom more than your dad. Another blessing.” He laughs at his own joke, but his mirth melts when he shifts his dark gray eye to Elliott, whose expression has turned stony.

“Oh, uh, yeah…I do,” I say, realizing too late that he thinks El liott is my father, though I’m not going to spend the energy to explain why he’s incorrect in his assumption.

Elliott doesn’t give me time anyway, if I were so inclined, when he snatches the two new sacks off the counter after paying without a word and leads us out of the store.

* * *

“Can you hold it a little longer?” I ask when Dustin crosses his ankles, having chugged his carton of strawberry milk when I told him to sip from it, needing to use the restroom not thirty minutes after Elliott had to stop on the side of the road for us to relieve ourselves once already.

I do, too, though I haven’t said mum to Elliott, who hasn’t spoken either since our weird interaction with the cashier.

Elliott is already inching down an exit off the interstate before I’ve had to lean up front to begrudgingly ask him, then he helps us all out, since if one needs to go, we probably all should.

Not. Fun. To say the least.

It’s been slow-going as it is with the sky unexpectedly dumping buckets of snow into the night, slicking the roads so that we are moving forward at a crawl in bumper-to-bumper traffic since we can hardly see ten feet in front of us.

It’s bad enough squatting on the ground, but doing so while dressed in as many layers as possible to keep warm, hardly able to bend a knee or elbow? Miserable.

Using Elliott’s flannel as an umbrella, I hold it over Sydney and Dustin’s heads when they take their turns, but can’t manage it myself when I have to hold onto a tree trunk for balance, so I’m shivering uncontrollably when I make it back, my nose frozen at the tip.

“Damn, Birdie, you’re going to freeze to death like this,” Elliott tuts, hefting me up.

Freeze is right since we both go rigid while I hover in Elliott’s hold two feet off the ground, snow collecting on our eyelashes.

He snaps out of it first, depositing me on the front passenger seat before stomping off and disappearing deeper into the dark woods.

It takes a long time for him to come back.

Elliott