No Rep by Lani Lynn Vale

CHAPTER 18

If the bar ain’t bending, you’re just pretending.

-Text from Fran to Taos

FRAN

“I told Taos to give you one more day,” Mavis said as she spoon-fed Vlad some green baby food.

Peas, I thought.

“What?” I asked, sounding shocked. “Why?”

I practically all but thrust my entire face into hers to better witness her explanation.

“Because you looked like you needed to work up the courage to finish telling him everything,” she said simply.

I felt my stomach jolt.

“There’s not really much to tell,” I admitted. “I just… I’m scared to talk to him. I’m scared he’s going to look at me differently.”

She rolled her eyes, then cursed. “Dang it. I forgot to go get the paper. Can you take over for a second?”

I rolled my eyes as she took off for the front door, handing me the spoon as she passed.

Vlad shrieked in protest, but I picked up the jar—yep, I was right. Peas—and brought a spoonful to his lips.

He ate it hungrily.

I laughed at his exuberance—oh, I wished he would keep loving peas—and fed him the rest of the jar before Mavis returned with the paper open as she walked into the room.

“Anything?” I asked.

Vlad’s father, Bayne Green, was on the way into town with his band. She wanted to make sure that she wasn’t anywhere near him and his scheduled appearances this weekend, so she was double-checking everything.

I didn’t blame her. Bayne Green was a dick.

When he’d learned that he’d had a kid with Mavis, he’d told her to ‘get rid of it.’

Mavis went out of her way not to associate Vlad with Bayne, and the good thing was, when you looked at Vlad, all you could really see was Mavis and me.

Thankfully, Bayne’s good looks were nowhere to be found in Vlad.

Bayne whose hometown was good ol’ Paris, Texas. Which was now becoming a local presence in and of itself thanks to it being the hometown of the bad boy of rock and roll.

“Okay, we’re all set.” She heaved a sigh. “The article in the paper says that…”

My eyes went to the paper as she got closer, and my eyes took in the photo on the front page.

My stomach sank as I got a good close up of my freakin’ house.

It was a photo that had my house and the house featuring the dead woman thanks to the serial killer, side by side.

Both looked really gloomy and ugly, thanks to the recent rainstorms battering our area.

Even my dead flowers near the mailbox added to the effect.

At first, I didn’t realize what I was seeing.

Not until Mavis got close enough for me to read the headlines.

I felt my stomach bottom out at the fear that started to overtake me.

It was back.

The gnawing, clawing, living, twisting thing inside of me.

I’d felt this feeling before.

It was my old friend, fear.

I read the headlines, then the article in the paper again, feeling my insides start to scream.

One witness has come forward on the grisly murders of twelve women over the Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana tristate areas. Francine Pope, thirty years old, of Paris, Texas. She is a registered nurse, as well as a critical pillar in the community.

I stopped reading, praying and hoping that more didn’t come of the words that I read.

Hoping beyond hope that they didn’t find what I tried so hard to keep buried—a victim of another serial killer.

What was I, a serial killer magnet?

What were the freakin’ odds that I would become a victim of not one, but two serial killers?

I wasn’t fooling myself. I knew damn well and good that shit was going to happen from this. I knew that the killer of these women was going to read this article, and think that I’d actually been a part of witnessing these murders when, in fact, I hadn’t.

Now I had a rather large target painted on my back.

Now, I was scared to death, and I would have to tell Taos why.

I wasn’t ready.

That’s when another thought occurred to me.

Taos.

He would know about this and…

The doorbell rang, and I knew without a doubt that the person on the other side of that door was him.

He knew.

I wasn’t ready for him to see me as a broken person. I wasn’t ready for him to treat me like a porcelain figurine. I wasn’t freakin’ ready to lose him!

And I knew I would.

Sure, he would be sympathetic. He now realized who I was to him. How he knew me.

I knew before my sister moved a muscle that he wouldn’t look at me the same anymore. That’d been why I’d been avoiding him, after all.

But this? This was definitely going to change everything.

He would think, oh, that’s sad. Then he’d go about protecting me, smothering me like every other person in my life who knew about the almost-rape and assault that I’d endured at the hands of a madman.

He wouldn’t be able to see past it.

“What’s wrong, doll?” Mavis whispered.

I swallowed hard and twisted the paper around in her hands and showed her the article, feeling a sinking sensation in my heart.

“Oh, shit,” she rasped after scanning the headline.

Vlad, who was in her arms eating, shrieked with protest when neither one of us moved to feed him the rest of his breakfast.

“Sorry, bud,” she whispered, sounding hoarse.

I felt her pain.

I was fucked.

“He’s going to come after you,” she breathed.

I felt fear course through me again at her concurring with my previous thoughts.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“No.” She sounded fucking shattered. “We just got over him.”

Him being Jackson Norris, a thirty-four-year-old investment banker that should’ve been an upstanding pillar of society.

On the outside, he was. On the inside, he was a monster bigger than anyone I’d ever experienced in my whole life.

Once the depth of his depravity—his satisfaction and enthusiasm in murdering women that turned him down for dates—came to light in that courtroom, it was horrifying.

He’d murdered over a dozen women in a year and a half. All of the women, according to him, had turned him down for a date. Every single one of them but me had met the same fate.

Every one of them but me.

But I’d been able to fight back. And Taos had been close enough to save the day.

Though he didn’t know just how many ways in which he’d saved me.

“You’re going to have to tell him,” she whispered, echoing my thoughts.

I cleared my throat, wanting to make sure it came out sounding sturdy.

It wouldn’t do to have her thinking I was a mess.

Even though I was.

“I have a feeling he already knows.” I sounded remarkably unaffected.

Her eyes sharpened. “You’re okay with this?”

The doorbell rang again. Again, we both ignored it.

I wasn’t. How could I be?

“No,” I admitted. “I’m fucking pissed as hell. I mean, who does this woman that wrote this article think she is? Where did she even get her sources?” I paused. “Does it mention it in there?”

She knew what ‘it’ was without me even having to explain.

“No,” she admitted. “She’s either very new to the city and the area, or she’s trying to at least save you a little bit of face.”

My guess was she didn’t know. That was too juicy of a subject to forget to mention like that.

“Or she’s planning to put that particular information into another article,” I grumbled.

“Or that,” she agreed. “I wish that I had a different answer for you. But, since your man is particularly unobservant, or wishes not to think about why he knows you so well as he does, doesn’t mean the rest of the city is that unobservant.” She winced. “But I might’ve blown that little top off when I talked to him at the gym. I mentioned Grandma.”

I shook my head. “I changed my name back, Mavis. My last name now matches yours. There’s no way he never made that connection. I just… we never talked about it. So I never thought it needed to be brought up. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t know.”

After the very publicized trial, I’d gone out of my way to distance myself from the ‘Pope’ name. To the point where I’d legally dropped “Pope” and used my middle name as my last name. It was too freakin’ noticed when we were young. Oh, you’re a Pope? Please, come to the front of the line.

Oh, you’re a Pope? Please, take the beating heart right out of my chest. I don’t think I need it anymore.

Honest to God, it’d been a breath of fresh air for everyone to talk to me, Fran, instead of Francine Pope, the girl that owned half the freakin’ world.

The girl who, with her sister, had lost her parents at a young age, and had practically been raised by her grandmother who fucking hated her guts.

My grandmother was still living and breathing. Still just as much of an asshole as she’d always been.

Still pissed that I would drop the name that she’d worked so hard to build.

What she didn’t know was that it was hard to use that name when you were young. People expected things out of you that you didn’t want to give. And if you didn’t meet their standards? They spread the word that a Pope had failed.

It was exhausting.

At least Francine Pope wasn’t a lie to Taos.

I hadn’t exactly offered up that information—me being filthy rich—but I hadn’t hidden it, either.

I mean, he’d seen the house that I had paid off. He didn’t see me hesitate in buying whatever I wanted. And who the hell could buy five-hundred-dollar shoes like I’d bought with him and not blink unless it was someone that had the money to spend?

Sure, I had a shitty car.

But that was just because I didn’t want to hear my grandmother bitch and complain about the car that I chose.

In the end, I was using her own hand-me-down. She couldn’t complain about that if she was the one who originally picked it out.

“I know who she is.”

Mavis and I both shrieked.

My heart literally exploded out of my chest at the unexpected arrival of Taos.

By the time I realized that I wasn’t about to be assaulted, I was on the floor with my hands covering my head.

“Well, that was fucking stupid,” Mavis snarled at Taos.

“Shit,” Taos whispered.

I felt his hands then prying me off the ground and tucking me into his arms.

I couldn’t stop the shivers that rocked through my body.

There were just too many things going wrong lately for me to be nonchalant about the unexpected arrival of a man in my house that’d been locked.

Still knowing it was him should’ve been a relief to my hyperaware nerves.

It wasn’t.

Not yet, anyway.

The shock and the adrenaline that’d mainlined through my system was still holding control of me.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He rocked me.

I heard Vlad shriek again and then Mavis say, “I’m sorry, buddy. I gotta get you a new spoon.”

That was because I was holding the other one in a closed fist and pressing it into my hair.

Even the thought of having to wash my hair again wasn’t enough for me to let it go.

I didn’t know how long either of us sat there. Him wrapped around me. Me pressed into his body heat, shaking and, later I’d come to find out, crying.

It had to be at least twenty minutes because, when I finally came to—panic attacks blew—it was to find the kitchen significantly darker, Vlad no longer in the room, and my sister glaring daggers at Taos who was quietly talking to her in reply to something she must’ve said or asked.

I let go of the spoon, which loudly clattered to the floor, causing the conversation between two of the most important people in my life to come to a screeching halt.

I brought my hands down to rest between Taos and me, and then turned my face so that I could inhale the familiar scent of him into my starved lungs.

I’d missed him over the last two weeks.

He’d said that he wasn’t going to have to deal with the murders anymore now that the FBI agent had arrived, but he’d lied.

When he wasn’t working at the gym, he was poring over the murder investigation.

Not that I could blame him.

But I’d missed him over the last two weeks.

Especially since I hadn’t had very much of my own time to myself.

Vlad and Mavis had practically moved in with me when Mavis and Vlad had been sick.

I wasn’t aware of the man wrapped around me moving until he tilted his head down and I saw the look in his eyes.

“Hey,” he whispered gruffly.

I swallowed hard. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head, his eyes telling me how stupid he felt before the words left his mouth. “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.”

I snorted. “My guess was you were really worried.”

He sighed. “I was. I saw that article in the newspaper and came right over. When you didn’t answer, my thoughts went totally sideways, and I just knew I’d come in here and find you…”

Dead. He thought he’d come in here and find me dead.

I sighed. “I’m fine.”

He made a humming noise in the back of his throat. “I think you should move in with me.”

I blinked, totally dumfounded by what had just come out of his mouth. Tilting my head back, I caught his eye. “Um, what?”

“I think that you should move in with me.”

I opened my mouth with something to say that started with the word ‘hell’ and ended with the word ‘no,’ but Mavis decided to put her two cents in, interrupting me before I could get the words out.

“I think that’s a great idea,” Mavis declared. “Seeing as this is your fault she’s on their radar to begin with.”

I sighed and pushed away from Taos’ chest. “It is not his fault, and you know it.”