One Day His (The Someday Series Book 2) (19 page)

I felt my own smile falter a little at that, but I tried to hide it quickly. I didn’t want to ruin this beautiful night that Jace had worked so hard to give me by letting my insecurities make me sad. Jace, however, was far too perceptive and far too tuned into me to let that slip by unnoticed. He leaned closer to me and looked into my eyes, speaking intensely as he ran his fingers through my hair.

“You do deserve it, Cat. Every bit of happiness. Every good thing that I can give you, you deserve. And I’m not gonna stop until you believe it for yourself.”

I smiled back, bolstered by his words. “I can live with that.”

Jace

A
s I waited
for Cat, who was helping Rachel with something, I stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows in Cat’s living room. Staring out at the crashing waves, I felt in complete awe of the gorgeous view. I figured that I should probably get my fill of the sight of Malibu beach waves because it was pretty spectacular and I had no idea if I would ever see them again. With how tough it had been on Cat since we’d been here, yesterday’s touristy adventures aside, I didn’t think she’d want to return anytime soon.

I felt arms around wrap around my waist and breasts press against my back. I turned my head just as I heard a familiar voice.

“That’s right, baby. I knew you wanted me.”

Holy shit!

I spun around, shocked out of my mind.

It wasn’t Cat standing there.

It was her mother.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I pushed her hands off me and backed away.

“Oh, don’t worry.” She dismissed me with a wave of her hand, walking towards me. “Cat won’t catch us.”

I shook my head, trying to clear it and organize my thoughts into some kind of recognizable order. This was totally off the charts crazy, even for Angelica. It was pure insanity.

“There’s nothing for Cat to ‘catch’ us doing. This isn’t happening. Stay the fuck away from me,” I said, my hands in the air as I tried to move around her without actually touching her.

Angelica wasn’t having it. She moved with ninja-like grace and speed, pinning me against the window. “I know you want me, everyone wants me. I haven’t been able to stop thinking of you since you since you got me all hot and bothered in the limo. I like a man who knows how to take charge.” With that statement she pressed up against me like a cat in heat, her arms snaking around my neck and crushed her lips to my mouth and began to kiss me.

I tried to move my face away at the same time that I pushed her shoulders back to pry her off me. But she was glued to me like white on rice. And she was surprisingly strong for her thin frame.

Just as I was able to push her face barely an inch away from me, I heard Cat gasp loudly from the other side of the room. Before I could remove Angelica’s arms from the death hold they had around my neck, I saw a flash of chestnut hair as Cat turned and ran out of the room.

Shit!

The worst part was that it didn’t even slow Angelica down. In fact, she barely seemed to notice at all. As carefully but firmly as I could manage, I placed my hands on her waist and picked her up then set her down in the chair beside the fireplace. It was a little more forceful than I’d ever touched a woman, but I hadn’t had a choice. The second I released Angelica in the chair I ran out of the room, chasing after Cat.

As I made it through the doorway, I heard Angelica’s amused and lilting voice behind me sing-songing, “You’ll be back!”

That woman was the definition of delusional.

I looked in the kitchen, then in Cat’s bedroom, and finally found her in the third place she’d told me she spent her time on the property—the beach. I ran up to her, out of breath at this point, and was heartbroken when I saw tears were streaming down her face.

Double shit.

“Baby,” I implored. “You have to believe I had nothing to do with that. She just jumped me out of nowhere. I was trying to get her off of me the entire time.”

Cat laughed without much amusement. “I know that. You should have seen yourself. Your hands couldn’t push her away fast enough and your face was screwed up like someone was trying to shove chocolate-covered maggots into your mouth.”

“Not chocolate-covered. Original-recipe maggots. Other than that, though, I think you’ve captured exactly how I felt.”

Cat laughed again, and this time, it was a little more lighthearted. I was glad that we could joke around after what had just happened. Even though I was happy that she was laughing, I knew I needed to get to the bottom of this. It was going to be a tough, awkward conversation, yes—but we couldn’t just go on together after something like that happening and not address it.

Slipping my arms around her, I pulled her towards me. She fit perfectly between my legs. My lips pressed the top of her head, I inhaled the sweet scent of her hair as I said sincerely, “I don’t want you to think that I think this is funny. It’s not. I am so sorry that you’ve had to deal with stuff like this your whole life.”

She shook her head. “Not like this. I’ve never had a boyfriend before. It’s certainly possible that, if I had, she would have pulled something like this with one of them. I just don’t know. No, wait. Actually, I do know. She definitely would have.”

“She’s sick, Cat. Just like Natalya is.” I wrapped my arms even tighter around her, wishing that my embrace could take away all the pain, all the trauma that she’d endured at the hands of that woman.

“You’re right,” she said as she took in a shaky, deep breath before looking up at me, her big, brown eyes shining with something that seemed dangerously close to determination.

“What?” I asked. I had no idea what was running through her pretty little head, but I did have a pretty good idea that I wasn’t going to like it.

“You’re right,” Cat began slowly, her fingers running over my hands, which were interlocked around her waist. “My mom is like Natalya. And you laid out boundaries for Natalya, so maybe I should—”

“No, Cat!” I interrupted harshly.

She flinched at my tone. I hadn’t meant to sound so forceful, but there was no way that Angelica would handle Cat putting up ‘boundaries.’ And Cat’s mom wasn’t some messed-up girl. She was a grown-ass woman who had been perfecting her unique form of crazy for years.

“This is different. She’s your mother. Your family,” I explained.

The look of determination burned even brighter than it had before and she scooted away from me causing my arms to fall to my sides. Straightening her shoulders she nodded. “Exactly. You’re right. She’s the only family I have. She’s my
mother
.”

Raking my fingers through my hair I tried to figure out a way to make her see that this was a not a path she wanted to do down. I was racked with helplessness as I drew a total blank. I knew that anything I said might just push her closer to this idea—this bad idea. I didn’t want her to open herself up like that. I had no idea how to make her understand why this was a colossally shitty plan.

“Jace.” Her voice sounded quiet. “I’ve never stood up to her. Never told her that the things she did to me, said to me, were wrong. I’ve never thought I had the strength or even any reason to. But now, you’ve changed all that. You’ve not only given me the strength to want to stand up to her. You’ve also made me see that I actually don’t deserve the things she does to me. I don’t deserve to be treated like that.”

Fuck.
When she put it like that, I didn’t really know how to argue with her.

“All right,” I agreed reluctantly. “On one condition. I’m going to be there. With you. When this goes down.”

No way was I going to let Cat lead herself like a lamb to the slaughter and not be there to make sure the wolves didn’t devour her. I thought she was going to argue with me, but once again, Cat surprised the hell out of me.

“Okay,” she said as she nodded once and stood, wiping the sand off her pants and the tears stains from her cheeks. “Let’s go.”

Wait. What?

My eyes shot to her in stunned disbelief. “Right now? You want to talk to her right now?”

A small smile played on her lips as she held out her hand to help me up. “I’ve always been a rip-the-Band-Aid-off-fast kind of girl.”

Overwhelmed with pride for my brown-eyed girl, I pushed up onto my feet and lifted Cat into my arms. She wrapped her arms around my neck and held onto me tight, perhaps needing to be held as much as I needed to hold her.

When I set her down and we started back up the walkway, I said, “Speaking of Band-Aids, do you think maybe I should grab some? Just in case.”

Cat laughed, sounding a little nervous. “That might not be a bad idea.”

Cat

M
y entire body
hummed with nervous energy as Jace and I walked back into the house. My mind was reeling from the decision I’d just made. I couldn’t believe that I was actually going to have an adult conversation with my mother—one where I made reasonable assertions and didn’t back down from the consequences. One, come to think of it, where I did anything besides sit quietly or nod. It was almost unfathomable.

Jace put his hand on my lower back and leaned down to whisper, “You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do.” I looked back at him and smiled, hoping he wouldn’t worry so much. I knew he thought this was a bad idea, but I knew I had to do this. Not because I thought it would make a bit of difference to my mom, but because I knew it would make a big difference for
me
.

We found my mother sitting in the study, in front of the fireplace, looking camera ready as always, casually flipping through the pages of a magazine as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary. I recognized this nonchalance. I had seen it displayed many times in the past after an ‘episode.’ It was my cue to start behaving like whatever major blowup had just occurred had been a figment of my imagination.

Well, not this time.

“Mom, I need to talk to you.” I was surprised by the steadiness and firmness of my voice.

Her head lifted and her eyes met mine. Her demeanor was all smiles and rainbows. “Cat, darling! There you are! I was just going to come look for you. Tell me, how do you think this haircut would look on me with my face shape?” She held up the magazine, squinting at the picture. After glancing back and forth between the pages and me, she said, “No, I think you’re right. I’ll stick with what I have. It really flatters my face. Now, tell me, what are your plans for the rest of the day? I was thinking perhaps we could take a nice little shopping trip. You can always use some new clothes for up at college, don’t you think? With the extra weight you’ve put on you probably need them.”

Ignoring her barb at my weight, I sat down on the couch. Jace followed my lead and took a seat beside me. It felt reminiscent of the ‘family therapy’ session of just a few days earlier, except that, now, I wasn’t the one facing the firing squad. The power dynamic had been flipped. It was still two against one, but I wasn’t on the short end of the stick anymore.

Somehow, I felt more comfortable, in many ways, on the other side. At least it was where I had always been and I knew what was expected of me. Here, I was completely out of my comfort zone and I feared that I was in over my head. I had absolutely no clue what I was going to say to my mother to start this whole Cat-sticking-up-for-herself intervention and even less of a clue how I might respond to her predictable wrath at what I ended up saying.

The little voice in the back of my head was whispering in my ear, telling me that it wasn’t too late to get out of this. All I had to do was make up something that I had wanted to talk to her about. Something innocuous. Something like asking her if she wanted to go out to dinner that evening or stay in.
Actually,
I thought,
all I
really
have to do is stand up and walk out the door.
I didn’t even have to come up with some big explanation. It would be a blip on her radar. In fifteen minutes, she’d be hard-pressed to remember that I’d even come in here.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, trying to quiet that voice. I needed to focus. I needed to remember that I was doing this for me, not for my mother. I couldn’t expect a certain reaction from her—definitely not a positive one. I needed to brace myself against her rage and yelling if that’s the route she chose to go. I needed to focus on the fact that Jace, my love, was right there with me, provided unfailing support.

But mostly, I needed to dive in before I lost my nerve.

My mother settled back regally into the club chair, and I tried to begin but immediately snapped my mouth shut like it was the jewelry box Richard Gere held in Pretty Woman. Damn. False start. Nerves rattled me reminiscent of when I was a kid trying to work up the nerve to get into a cold pool. I figured the same logic could apply here. Trying to work your way in toe by toe was torture. Best to just jump.

“Soooo, what’s up, Cat?” my mother said flatly but with obvious razor blades just below the surface of her voice. I recognized that she was parroting back to me what I had said at the beginning of the family therapy session she had sprung on me just after Jace and I had arrived.

I guessed that, even if she acted like she wasn’t paying attention, she actually was hearing me. Of course, she most likely wasn’t listening for the purpose of really paying attention to what I had to say. She was merely storing up ammunition. I wasn’t sure if that was better or worse than if I weren’t on her radar at all.

I smiled a little. “Well, I want to talk about what just happened in the living room with Jace.”

She didn’t respond, just continued sitting there as if waiting for me to go on.

I obliged. “You know…um…when you kissed Jace just now.”

She didn’t say anything, but her facial expression clearly said,
I am quite sure I have no idea what you are talking about.

I gave her a moment to compose her thoughts. When she still didn’t say anything, I pressed ahead. “Mom, Jace is
my
boyfriend. It’s really… It’s just… inappropriate for you to kiss him.”