She rested her head on his shoulder. They were already sitting close, but when he said stuff like that, she couldn’t resist the desire to crawl even closer. “I know it’s a cliché, but you ruined me for every guy who came after. Only Joel and Silas managed to jump from dating to relationships, and even those felt…more like we were just phoning it in. With you…” Ella’s mind fought for some way to explain.
As always, Maverick found the perfect words. “You’re the other half of me, Ella. I was half a man until you—andafteryou. When I saw you in Whiskey Abbey all those weeks ago, it was the first time I felt whole again. Like myself.”
She nodded, because that was exactly how it was for her too. “Yes,” she whispered. “That.”
He kissed the top of her head. His lips touched her as much as his hands. “Your letter said I’d taken advantage of you, forced you to do things you didn’t want.”
Ella had to swallow back the bile in her throat, because now that she was hearing those words from his perspective…
They held a different meaning.
“I didn’t write that letter,” Ella said.
Maverick frowned. “It was your handwriting.”
“No,” she quickly corrected. “I mean, I wrote it, but they weren’t my words. My father dictated them to me.”
From Maverick’s expression, she could tell she was failing in her explanation.
It was time to start at the beginning, time to relive that horrible day that she’d suppressed, buried in the very back on her mind. She’d only pulled it out one other time, when Gigi had taken her out of school and demanded answers to what happened in Gracemont.
“You know my father was strict,” she started.
Maverick nodded.
“And extremely religious. He’s a zealot, really, and his views on life are all pulled from Old Testament scripture and from the fucked-up views of the churches we’ve attended.”
“I remember what church you attended,” Maverick grumbled, making it clear he was also familiar with their doctrine.
Ella scoffed. “In my dad’s church, the word of God and then the word of the husband is law. Women were put on this earth to procreate and obey.”
Maverick’s scowl rivaled Edith’s. “What kind of fucking bullshit is that?”
Ella grasped his hand, squeezing it. “Thebiggestkind of bullshit, but Dad believes it with every fiber of his being. He moved us to Gracemont because he thought Gigi was a bad influence on me. Bad influence, meaning, she taught me to think for myself, encouraged me to speak my mind, and assured me that I was not less than any man simply because I was a woman.”
Maverick smiled. “I would have liked your grandmother.”
“She loved you,” Ella said.
Maverick chuckled. “She never met me.”
“I told her all about you. She said you sounded like my grandfather, a good man.”
Maverick lifted her hand, kissing her knuckles before winking playfully. “Sounds like you oversold me.”
Ella shook her head, giggling. Here she was, sharing one of her most painful memories, and Maverick was finding ways to keep her from falling too deep into the darkness.
“You know Martha and I weren’t allowed to date until we were eighteen.”
Maverick nodded.
She sighed. “Dad found out about us. Someone from our church saw me riding in your pickup. Mentioned it to Dad. That last day we were together, when you dropped me off at the back door of the library, Dad was waiting just inside. He’d seen me get out of your truck.”
“What the hell did he do?” Maverick asked in a voice so dark and, well, terrifying, Ella thought perhaps she should be scared. Instead, it was as if he’d glued wings to her back. Because his obvious concern for her welfare made her feel as if she could soar, her feet no longer touching the ground.
She’d been painfully low on champions in her lifetime, her only other one dying six months earlier.
“He took me home, shoved me to the kitchen floor, and told me to start praying. I’d never seen him so angry, so I did what he said. Reciting every prayer I’d ever heard in my life while he paced the floor around me, listening. At the beginning, I was grateful he hadn’t pulled out his belt, but it turned out, he knew plenty of other ways to hurt me. I was trembling, terrified of what he might do. Every time I started to fall to my haunches,he pulled me back up to my knees by my hair. The tile floor was hard, painful.”
