“Johnny, how old were you when this happened?”
“Eight years old.”
I couldn’t stop it; I started crying. The tears ran soundlessly down my face. “Does Shayla know about this?”
He looked at me again. There was a faraway look in his eyes, like he’d gone somewhere else in his head. But he refocused on me now, and for just a moment, I glimpsed so clearly the scared little boy that he tried so hard to hide. “No. Please don’t tell her.”
“I won’t,” I said automatically. I had no idea why he didn’t want her to know, but right now, that didn’t matter. “But how is that possible? Your dad must know…?”
“Yeah. My dad knows. He’s the only one.”
“How?”
He took a deep, shaky breath, staring at me, like he was trying to digest the fact that he’d gotten this far and I was still here. “Afterwards… I had a long recovery in the hospital. I don’t remember most of that part. I was too young to be charged with any crime. My name wasn’t in the papers or anything. So no one knew. But as soon as I got out of the hospital, my dad decided to pack up and move us across the country. His girlfriend and their new baby—Shayla—and me. I’d grown up in this small town in Ontario and my dad relocated us to West Vancouver, and he married Shayla’s mom. So, suddenly I had this whole new life, in a new city, in a new home, with a new family. My mom stayed in Ontario. She wasn’t very… mentally stable at that point.”
“Shit. Johnny. I had no idea about any of this.”
“Yeah. It’s pretty fucked.” He rubbed his hand over his face. He looked pale and exhausted. “I barely even saw my mom after that. Not until I was older. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t go back or talk to anyone from that part of my life. Dad just wanted us to start over somewhere far away, so no one would ever know. He even changed our last name. He started going to church, he got deeply into that, and he focused on work, building up his wine import business and his standing in our new community. He was trying to protect me from what happened by running away and pretending it didn’t happen, I guess. And the result of that was that he was always too busy with other things to talk to me about it. He sent me to therapists so he wouldn’t have to. And it was kind of an unwritten rule in our house that you just didn’t talk about it. That it was inappropriate to tell my stepmom or my sister. That’s what the doctors were for, so I had someone to talk to. So… I guess I have abandonment issues,” he concluded.
Another oversimplification, I was sure, but it made so much of his behavior make sense.
He was probably more scared than I was of this thing between us not working out.
“I’m not blaming my dad,” he added. “He was doing what he thought was best for me. But it kind of made it worse, in the end.”
“Because it became a secret,” I said gently.
“Yeah.”
“And you’ve carried that secret for a long time. And you thought… it would change how I feel about you if I knew?”
His eyes held mine, looking both scared and guarded. There were tears in them now. “Doesn’t it?”
I considered that carefully. “Johnny…” I said gently. “The fact that you trust me enough to tell me the hardest thing you ever went through… that only makes me love you more.”
Johnny blinked at me, looking stunned and relieved and so fucking tired, I just wanted to wrap him up and take him home with me and keep him safe forever.
Then he looked down at our joined hands and said quietly, “I’m so glad I met you, Angeline.”
I was pretty sure he was crying and trying to hide it, so I hugged him and pretended not to notice. “Same here.”
I climbed into his lap and his arms went around me, holding me tight. Then he whispered in my ear, “No matter what happens… you are the best thing that’s ever happened in my life.”
“Good. Then don’t ever let anything change that.”
ChapterThirty-Four
Johnny
Lamar and I pulled up along the row of nondescript gray buildings that looked more like garages than artists’ studios. Access was from the back lane. He’d drop me off and go find somewhere to park until he was needed, but not before he gave me a gruff, “You want me with you?”
He was eying the biker leaning on the wall, next to the door with the number on it that Dylan Cope had given me.
“No. It’s fine. I’ll call you if I need a ride to the hospital.”
Lamar turned his dark eyes on me with an unamused look.
I got out and he took his time pulling away, probably eying the biker up and down. His name was Connor, he was a member of the West Coast Kings, and the man was nothing if not a public service for bikers everywhere with his white toothed smile and jolly giant vibes. Tall, blond and handsome, with a casual man-bun, the dude could crush a skull with a bicep curl.
