Second Chance Love (Heaven Hill Book 6) Page 9

  “That’s perfect, I’ll be waiting on you.”

  Rooster hung up and beat his hand against the steering wheel. He had a bad feeling about this, and this wasn’t what he needed on today of all days. Putting the paperwork that Travis had given him under the seat, he resigned himself into realizing that this whole situation just might suck ass.

  Roni waited for Rooster to get to her apartment, watching out the window for what he would be driving. Sometimes he drove his truck, sometimes he drove his bike. Either way, she wanted to be ready when he pulled in. If she wasn’t, she was afraid she wouldn’t go through with the appointment she’d made, and she had to go through with it. She had to tell him the truth before they moved any further. She would never be able to give herself to him until she purged herself of the poison.

  This was going to be the hardest thing she’d ever done. She’d told no one about this, not even Liam. He had his suspicions, but she’d never verified them and she’d never offered to talk about it. The only other person in the world who knew her secret besides the doctor that had performed the procedure was her dad. Even though she’d gotten closer to her mom in recent years, she’d never been able to tell her what had gone down, afraid that it would somehow harm the relationship they’d started to build with one another.

  The other fear was that her budding relationship with Rooster wouldn’t survive. That was the main reason she’d stopped the physical contact between the two of them after their night at the swimming hole. She couldn’t handle it if he decided he could no longer be with her, if they could no longer build this relationship. That’s what they were going to work on today, and she knew she was a bitch for springing this on him, but in this, she had to make the decisions that were right for her. It was such a gaping wound in her soul that she knew she couldn’t think about him. He had no idea what had gone on, and he wouldn’t until she told him.

  Rooster’s truck pulled in the parking lot, and she quickly grabbed her bag and exited her apartment, running toward it like she was meeting him for a date. He reached over to the side and opened the passenger door for her and she climbed inside. She leaned over; kissing him the lips and letting herself linger there. She had to hold onto it, just in case he decided he didn’t want it anymore after what she was about to put him through.

  “I’m happy to see you,” he told her, and the way he said it almost made her cry. He really was happy to see her, and she hoped that he would still be happy to see her within an hour, after she had completely changed his life.

  “I’m happy to see you too,” she answered, reaching over to grab his hand. She needed to hold onto something, to keep him with her, just in case.

  “Where are we headed?”

  She didn’t want to tell him exactly where they were going. She wasn’t sure if he knew of the place or not. Roni figured he may have, after so many people in the club had employed the services of Doc Jones, but she wanted to keep this a secret for as long as she could. She gave him directions, but never told him the name of where they were going. As they pulled up in front of an old farmhouse, he cut the engine but kept his hands on the steering wheel.

  “Wanna tell me why we’re at Doc Jones’?”

  Roni swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. “Because I have some things to tell you and I think you have some things to tell me. Instead of inadvertently hurting each other, maybe we can work through whatever it is with the help of a third party that doesn’t know either one of us.”

  He could see the appeal and was actually happy that she’d thought about this, but that didn’t mean he was shot in the ass about going to see a shrink. “If that’s what you think we need, we’ll do it, but I have to tell you…I’m worried.”

  “I am too,” she admitted. “There are things I should have told you, but I haven’t, and I need some help to get through those things. That’s all this is. If you have anything you want to discuss while we’re in there, we will. But I want to make sure that I get everything out in the open, and then you can decide if you still want to be with me. When we leave here there will be no hard feelings and I have a backup ride in case I need it.” Her mouth was bone dry as she said those words to him. Meredith had promised she would be around, just in case shit went south.

  “What the fuck is it you’re going to tell me?” He couldn’t think of anything that would ever put him in that kind of situation with her. He had to wonder what she was hiding and how long she’d hid it. He had foolishly thought they had learned from keeping secrets before. “I don’t want there to be any secrets between us either, and we’ve both made mistakes. We get it out in the open here, and then we let it go.”

  She bit her lip, not wanting to get out of the truck because she knew that once she stepped out of this cocoon her life would possibly change and maybe not for the better. “I hope you’re still willing to say that after I tell you what I need to.”

  “Roni.” He turned her face so that they looked each other head on. “Don’t make assumptions about me. No one knows how they are going to react to certain situations, and judging by the way you’re acting, this situation sucks. At least give me the benefit of finding out what it is and processing it before you lump me in a group with other people.”

  “I can do that.” She cleared her throat and glanced back at the house. It was then she noticed that an older looking lady had come out on the porch. “I think that’s her. She’s probably wondering what we’re doing sitting here in the truck instead of coming in.”

  Rooster’s heart pounded as he opened the door and slid from the driver’s seat onto the ground. He felt indescribable as he walked around the truck and held out his hand for Roni. She was much slower coming to meet him, but he’d expected that. She obviously had something that she didn’t want to admit to him and it was weighing heavily on her. Little did she know his own secret was weighing heavily on him. Maybe this was something they both needed, a blessing from above that she’d decided to do this. Either way, whatever was going to happen would happen, and it appeared it was going be this afternoon. He gripped her hand strongly in his as they made their way to the front porch where the older woman stood.

  “Rooster and Roni?” She asked, wanting to verify before she let them inside.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Rooster held out his free hand for her to shake and watched as Roni did the same.

  “I was beginning to wonder if the two of you were going to come in.” She smiled warmly at them.

  “We thought about turning tail and running all the way to Mexico,” Rooster joked. “But running away from something never fixes it, and if we’re here, we have something to fix.”

  Doc Jones nodded at the two of them. “That’s what I like to hear before you take the first step into this house. If you know you have something to fix and you’re open to it, then this will be much easier. Should we get started?”

  Roni looked down where her hand was still clasped with Rooster’s. He squeezed it in a comforting gesture. “Yeah, let’s get started,” she said quietly.

  She had no doubt that this would be one of the most emotional afternoons of her life, but she was ready for it. With him by her side, she could do anything, and well, if he decided not to be there after this was over, she could still do anything. She would just have to lick her wounds in private and then figure out a way to move on with her life.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Roni sat on the couch in Doc Jones office, wringing her hands together. She wasn’t sure how people were supposed to feel once they got here, but she was nervous as hell. Everyone that she’d spoken with told her how easy it was to talk to the older woman once they got going, but Roni was beginning to doubt that. They’d been here for almost fifteen minutes and neither one of them were any closer to spilling their guts than they had been when they first walked inside. Neither one of them had barely said a sentence, much less anything else.

  “Roni, you’re the one who called me,” Doc Jones started when it was apparent the two of them
weren’t going to offer her any information. “Why did you feel the need to have me around when you speak to Rooster?”

  She shifted in her seat; this part was the hard part. It felt like the spotlight was on her and she was on display. Being on display was never something her personality had craved and it made her very uncomfortable. If it helped her move on with her life, she knew that she had to do it. “Rooster and I had a relationship as teenagers that was very intense.” She stopped, not sure that she could go on.

  “When you say intense, in what way? Most teenage relationships are intense only because of the way we overreact in our teen years.” Doc Jones quirked her brow, hoping one of the other club members had told Roni about her penchant to ask questions and make them answer when they were sitting on her couch.

  Rooster picked up for her when she struggled to find the words. “It was a sexual relationship, and I daresay there was a lot of love there—at least as much love as two teenagers can have for one another. It was forbidden, her father didn’t want me to see her, I was best friends with Liam. We had to sneak around, and sneaking around made it that much sweeter.”

  It was beginning to click a little in Doc Jones’ head. “It was passionate and forbidden and that made it even more illicit. The danger of getting caught made it that much better?”

  “It did.” Rooster scratched his neck, grinning a little. “We would purposely do things when we knew we weren’t supposed to, but we couldn’t stop ourselves. I thought I would marry her,” he whispered.

  Her head whipped around, her gaze wide as she looked at him. That was one thing she’d never known. They had not one time spoken of that.

  “We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here,” Doc Jones slowed them down. “What happened to make you call me?”

  “Like he said, we had a very intense, very passionate relationship. Because of that, we argued over stupid shit, probably more than most. One night to get back at one another, we went to a party and started flirting with different people. Worst case scenario happened, a man attempted to force himself on me, I slammed him in the back of the head with a blunt object, and Rooster and my brother took the fall for it.”

  “He died?” Doc Jones wanted to make sure she understood exactly where these two were coming from.

  Roni nodded. “He did,” she whispered. “I’m not proud of letting them take the blame. I have a lot of guilt about that, but that’s my own shit that I need to work through.”

  “There was no way we were letting you take the fall for it when we were the ones who should have been watching out for you. I don’t know how many times I’ve told you that. Had Liam and I not been dumbasses, you wouldn’t have been in the situation. We made it right,” Rooster argued.

  “Now, wait a second,” the older woman interrupted. “You may have made it right for yourself, Rooster, but that doesn’t necessarily make it right for Roni. She’s still going to carry her feelings around, and she’s allowed to. If she hasn’t worked through them, then she can’t let them go. Guilt is a crazy thing; it can eat at you for most of your life if you let it.”

  “I have guilt over more than just that,” Roni breathed deeply. “That night set forth a series of events that I couldn’t stop. I dug my heels in and tried to, more than anyone knows, but I couldn’t. Oh sure, I could have tried harder, but at that point in my life, I wanted to die.”

  Rooster’s head snapped back as if he had been hit. He’d never known that she had wanted to die. That was something Roni had never shared with him. Now he was beginning to get nervous. Did he really want to know what was going on here? When she’d told him that she wanted to see a shrink, he’d foolishly thought she was overreacting, but now he wasn’t so sure. “No,” he whispered. “You shouldn’t ever have felt like you wanted to die.”

  She hadn’t meant to get right into it, but she figured it was like a Band-Aid, it needed to be ripped off quickly. There was no sense in dragging it out. “Please don’t interrupt me when I start this,” she begged the two of them. “I don’t know if I can bring myself to go through it again once I start.”

  They both nodded. Rooster grabbed her hand for support, and Doc Jones pulled her notepad in her lap, pen at the ready to take notes.

  “After Liam and Rooster were sent off, my dad kinda had it out for me. He was pissed that Liam had gotten in trouble. He was planning on having Liam do some of the more dangerous things in the club when he turned eighteen because he didn’t have a record and he could get away with more. It wouldn’t be his second or third strike. I fucked that up, and he didn’t hesitate to take that out on me every time he could.”

  Beside her, Rooster tensed, and she could tell this was going to be bad. Telling him what she had to might break the two of them. Their relationship was on thin ice, she knew that, but she had to tell him. This relationship had to be right.

  “This is hard,” she sniffed. “I don’t want to tell you this.” She looked over at him. “But I want this to work, and I can’t go any further without telling you. I can’t get this close to you again and then have it all fall apart. I won’t survive it again.”

  He reached over, running a thumb over her cheek bone. “Tell me, please just tell me.”

  “A few weeks after Liam got locked up and you got sent away, I started feeling sick. I thought it was because I missed the two of you so much. I was always around both of you and there you were gone. I was alone, in a situation I didn’t want to be in. You were my support system, and I worried myself to death about both of you. I wrote it off as me manifesting all that worry physically. I was tired all the time, puking, stomach rolling at every turn—then certain smells starting getting to me. I knew I was pregnant, even before I took the test. I didn’t want William to know.” She couldn’t call him “dad” in this moment. It hurt too much.

  Rooster inhaled sharply, doing his best not to jump to a hasty conclusion, but his stomach had dropped. He had an awful feeling about this. Roni had no child, so obviously something had happened.

  “I was able to hide it for a few weeks,” she continued, not meeting any eyes in the room. She held her head down, afraid to lift it. Part of her was scared to look and see how Rooster was taking the news. “Those weeks were happy, even though I was scared to death. I was making plans. My mom had found a way to get out of there; I was going to do it too. Rooster wouldn’t be at the camp forever and Liam wouldn’t be in juvie forever. I was going to bide my time until I could talk to you and we could make a plan together. We were going to be a family.”

  “What happened?” His voice was raw, it sounded the way he felt. He knew with everything in him that William had fucked this up too.

  “He found out. He got me in the car and told me we were taking a drive. I didn’t think anything about it,” she told them. “He was my dad. Why would I have any cause to be scared? He did things to other people, not to his own daughter.” She choked on the words, gazing off as she told the story.

  “C’mon Roni,” William yelled. “We need to get going.”

  Why was he in such a hurry? Her stomach was rolling—she’d been sick since she’d woken up that morning. The saltines were no longer doing it for her, and she knew that soon she’d have to find a doctor and get verification of everything. Maybe they could prescribe her something to help with the morning sickness. Usually it wasn’t so bad, but some days, she could barely lift her head—this was one of those days. “Be right there,” she yelled back. It was going to take every bit of control she had over herself to get out of bed and face this day head-on.

  Slowly, she made her way to her dad’s truck and got in.

  “You okay?” he asked, glancing over at her.

  He wore cologne, and the smell of it was overpowering to her senses. She quickly rolled the window down, sticking her head out as far as she could to get away from the stench. “Fine.” She shook her head, gulping in the fresh air.

  They didn’t speak as he took off towards town, and honestly, she was so tired tha
t she didn’t even want to carry on a conversation. Abruptly, she pitched forward, realizing that she had fallen asleep.

  “Get out of the truck,” William said to her sharply.

  She fought to get a handle on where they were, she’d never seen this place before. It was a house, but she wasn’t sure why they were here. “Where are we?”

  When she didn’t move fast enough, he came around the side, opened the door, and yanked her out. “We’re someplace that’s going to take care of the little problem you have. You will not be having Brandon Hancock’s baby, now, or ever.”

  It was then she understood what he was saying. She started screaming, trying to kick away from the hold he had on her. With one hand, he grabbed her by the hair, with the other, he backhanded her.

  “Get your ass up those steps and into the house. You don’t want me to take care of it for you,” he whispered through gritted teeth.

  He would beat her until she lost the baby. How was this man her father and what had she done to deserve this?

  “For three weeks, I bled, and I would cry myself to sleep every night. I waited for you to get out of that camp. I wanted to tell you everything, and all I wanted was to feel your arms around me, you to tell me that it was okay,” she trailed off.

  “And when I got out, I was different, I wasn’t all like what you expected,” he finished for her.

  “No.” She shook her head. “You hated to even look at me.”

  “I hated that I had put you in that situation,” he told her. “And now I find out this? God, why would you even want to mess with me after everything I put you through?” His voice was tortured. What had he done to the two of them? How had she been able to look past all the shit he’d done in the last few years? How could she come to him now and really want to make a life with him?