And upset.
And I didn’t like that.
“Honey bunches of oats,” I whispered.
His gaze came right back to mine.
And doing so, he made my heart warm right up in a way I knewsure as certain it would never again be cold.
Not ever.
Not ever again.
Not as long as Marcus was with me.
“It don’t sound good but it was,” I told him, real quiet,moved by his look that I felt in my heart.“I lost her but even though she’dbeen gone for years, she was there for me in that moment when I needed hermost.It wasn’t good for me there.And even with what happened to me in thatparking lot, since I left that place, it’s never again been that bad.That’show bad it was.She wanted me to have the means to escape when I’d had enough.It was the most precious gift anyone ever gave me.The time she gave it byhandin’ me that box.And the time I hocked it and boughtmyself freedom.”
“There’s no more good?”he asked.
“Smithie,” I told him.
“Other than him.”
“LaTeesha,” I went on.
“Daisy, you understand me.”
I shook my head and gave his thigh a squeeze.“Sugar, youaren’tgettin’ it.I had her for a short while.But Ihad her.Do you know where I’d be if I didn’t?”
“No.Where would you be?”
“Back there in a place where every day was hell.I’dprobably have a man who drank or gambled or shot up or beat me or all those.OrI’d have a string of ’em, none of ’emtreatin’ me right.A job thatI hatedworkin’,doin’ itwith people who thought they were better than me.My momma alternatelyhittin’ me up for money orgettin’in my face,bein’ ugly.Miss Annamae taught me tokeep my head held high, darlin’, and I wasstrugglin’with that.”I leaned into him.“Reallystruggling.They would havebeaten me.She gave me the way out when without herdoin’that I’d have no way out, and here I am, in a fancy restaurant in a great townwith a handsome man.It’d make her happy.Real happy, baby.”
When I was done talking, his attention moved to my hair, asdid his hand.He pulled some curls over my shoulder and stared at them restingthere.
“You know why it was,” he murmured to my hair.
“Pardon?”
His gaze came to mine and the hand he’d used to shift myhair he now used to sweep his fingertips across my cheekbone in a whisper of atouch that was there and gone.
But the precious memory of that touch would remain until theday I quit breathing.
“People live lives they hate,” he said, resting his armalong the top of the booth beside me.“They see a patch of light, the onlything that drives them is to snuff it out.”
I gave him a small smile and said, not mean, “That’s sweet,sugar, but that’s liketellin’ a homely girl all theother girls bully her ’cause they’re jealous.”
“So what you’re telling me is that all that’s happened toyou is just about predators preying on the weak?”
My head twitched.
“You aren’t weak, Daisy,” he stated.
No, I wasn’t.
I’d been knocked down.Again and again.
I just kept getting up.
