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I got up and began searching for my clothes. Whether Pippa was awake yet or not, I was going to go get her and busy myself with giving her a bath or something. As if I needed the stress of a slippery baby on top of the stress of dealing with West. Whatever.
West stood up too and came over to clasp my arm. “Wait. Stop. I’m sorry. You’re right. I don’t understand. But I’d like to. Will you sit back down and talk to me?”
His voice was kind, and his touch was gentle. After letting him guide me back onto the bed, I turned to him to try to make him understand.
“West. We didn’t grow up like you, with enough money and family support to be comfortable. After my dad died, my mom had to get any job she could. She cleaned houses in town and made shit for money. My dad had already been making shit for money as it was, and we lived in a run-down trailer for god’s sake. The only way they could even afford what little we did have was because this piece of land and the trailer had been my grandfather’s getaway spot when he wanted to take a break from his wife and kids in Galveston. He’d come up here with his buddies and fish and drink beer. It was just a scrubby lake property with a double-wide trailer on it, so it was a step up from camping, you know?”
West held one of my hands in his and toyed with my fingers. It felt good.
“So when Dad died, we had nothing. My mom cleaned houses. Adriana babysat, and I mowed lawns to help out where we could. Sometimes the church helped us out, which was nice but humiliating. It sucked. It was awful watching my mom and sister work their asses off and still live in a shitty, bug-infested trailer with one moody window air-conditioning unit and no money for anything other than thrift-store shit and ramen noodles. If you had a chance to sacrifice yourself so your mom and sister could live in a decent house and have new things, wouldn’t you at least consider it?”
“I guess I would, Nico. But why didn’t you tell them the truth?”
I knew the minute the words were out of his mouth he knew the answer to his question.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “I guess you worried they’d feel responsible.”
“Yes. And that my mom would break up with the sheriff before letting me go,” I admitted. “I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself, knowing she gave up her chance for happiness and comfort for me.”
“The sheriff put you in an impossible situation, didn’t he?” West’s words were so kind I wanted to tell him to stop. “But you told Adriana something?”
I laughed. “No, not really. Curt made sure to let it slip around town that I had stolen the sign. After Adriana found out, she was pissed. Anyway, when I decided to leave, I told her there were just too many crappy things about Hobie for me, everyone thought I was shit, and I wanted a fresh start. She knew the truth though. I had told her about overhearing the neighbor, remember? I’m sure she put two and two together even though I swore to her that wasn’t why.”
“Why didn’t you stay in touch at least?” he asked.
I took a breath and let it out slowly, trying to decide whether or not I could get into that part of it with him. Luckily, Pippa began her precry whimpering in time to spare me the decision. I jumped up to slip on my clothes and make my way into the nursery, hearing West’s teasing warning from behind me.
“We’re not done here, Nicolas Salerno.”
I smiled to myself as I reached for the baby in the crib. The unique way he emphasized the “Nico” in “Nicolas” made my heart flip-flop. It was incongruent with his preppy cowboy shtick, and I wondered what other words he pronounced that way—sultry, dirty, exotic…
Promising.
Chapter 22
West
I let him go. There was no doubt in my mind he wasn’t used to sharing his personal crap, so I dropped the subject as soon as he retrieved Pippa from her room. Part of me felt like I’d pushed him into a kind of intimacy that wasn’t my place. Why in the world would he want to open up to someone like me when I was the very epitome of the town and people he resented so much?
After I joined him in the kitchen, I began straightening the paperwork we’d left out from our earlier work on the bakery bookkeeping. Whatever the reason for the discrepancy, it was clear Sugar Britches was in the red just as he’d suspected.
I’d noticed from the receipts that he’d made a deposit that week from his own personal accounts in order to make payroll. There was no way of knowing how much of a sacrifice that had been for him, but since he’d told me about being the main tattoo artist at his shop, I had to assume him being gone this long was going to seriously cut into his income back home. I wondered if he needed help—financial or otherwise.
