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“Oh…uh…hey babe.” P.J. stumbled over the words, obviously surprised to see her. He was sitting at the table with two men who Juliet recognized from pictures as Reno McCabe and Jules Bonny. The two men looked up at her with studied blank faces, while P.J.’s expression was one of alarm. Juliet glanced at the small stack of papers laid out on the table that P.J. was furiously gathering up in his hands. She assumed that she had stumbled on some sort of club business.
“My last appointment was cancelled, so I came a little early.” Juliet smiled shyly at the two men who were looking at her with…suspicion? Maybe she should have stuck to the scheduled time. This cool, appraising look was certainly not the welcome she had expected to receive from Reno’s family. When P.J. stood awkwardly silent, she decided to introduce herself. “I’m Juliet. It’s nice to meet you.”
She approached them with hand held out in greeting. But when a sudden small gust of wind lifted one of the pages up from the table and landed at her feet, Juliet’s instinct was to reach down and grab it.
Juliet drew her hand back as if it had been burned. The bakery box felt from lifeless fingers and smashed on the ground. Because there laying at her feet, was a three year old, front page picture of Lucy Brewster. The headline was one that Juliet had seen over and over again. It read… Wife of Killer, Victim or Accomplice?
Juliet stumbled and almost lost her footing, when P.J. reached for her she put her hand up warding him off. He said something to her, but Juliet could not hear him over the sound of her own heart breaking. It was a clean jagged noise, like the crackling of ice. Juliet was afraid that when it stopped, she would fall straight through and drown.
And then things got worse.
Because there, lying in the middle of the table was Juliet’s wallet. The one that P.J. had told her had disappeared in the mud months ago. Lying next to it, in the dim shadows of the late afternoon sun, laid out for all to see, were all of the monsters in all of Juliet’s closets.
“Juliet?” P.J. called out to her as she ran past him to grab the wallet off the table.
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t do anything but try and grasp how this had happened. How could he have done this? Juliet felt the blood drain from her face, and her hands curve into tight fists.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Reno McCabe begin to rise from the table. Juliet turned and ran from him, from all of them. She ran as fast as she could to the truck but before she could get the keys in the ignition, P.J. pulled her out of the seat and held a struggling, screaming, kicking, biting, Juliet tight in his arms.
“Stop it, Juliet. You’re gonna hurt yourself.” P.J. told her after a particularly vicious kick hit him in the shins.
His arms were like iron bands around her while she spent out her rage. P.J. picked Juliet up and carried her to the back of the house and kicked open the door to the finished basement. Then still holding Juliet in his arms, he kicked it shut behind him. “I’m gonna let you go once you settle the hell down, but I swear to god Juliet, if you keep this shit up, I’m gonna grab a hold of you again.” It took a few more minutes before the rage had spent all her energy and P.J. felt Juliet slump in his arms.
“Why?” She whispered as she pulled away from him. Her voice ragged with emotion; the fight gone out of her. What was left was an expression of infinite sadness, and that made P.J. feel much worse than her anger had. “Just tell me why.”
“Babe, I’m not even sure what’s going on here.” P.J.’s big arms crossed against his chest, his back against the door, effectively trapping Juliet in.
“You don’t know why my wallet was sitting on that table?” She narrowed her tear swollen eyes at him.
“Alright. The wallet? That was me. I sent it to Jules. But I had just come back from the compound like two minutes before you showed up, he didn’t even have time to explain anything to me yet.”
Juliet’s whole body went numb, and she sat down on the couch in defeat. “What I want to know is why, P.J.? Why was it so damn important to you to stick your nose in where it had no business going? It didn’t matter to you that I didn’t want that, that I didn’t want you to go prying into my past?” Juliet gave him a look filled with sorrow. “You tricked me.”
“Goddamn it, Juliet, I didn’t trick you…”
“You did! You lied to me and you tricked me.” Her face contorted in pain.
“Baby, I didn’t.” P.J. pushed off the door and moved towards her.
“Yes You. Did!” She cried as she moved away and jabbed the air with her tightly gripped wallet. “The first time you made love to me was the night you lied about finding this! I never, never, thought you would do this to me.”
“Okay, so I had my uncle look into you.” P.J. admitted. “And I know that it looks bad from where you’re sitting, and I guess I’d be pissed too…”
“You guess?” Juliet’s eyes went wide with angry incredulity.
“It’s what we do, Juliet.” He told her. “Aside from wanting to get to know you, to protect you from whoever this asshole is that you’re running from …I am a Saint, baby, born and bred and no matter how much of a part of that I tried to leave behind, it’s who I am and where I come from. I won’t…I can’t…bring someone into my life when I don’t know everything there is about them. It’s just too damn risky. So, I waited. I waited and I watched, and I prayed to every damn god there is that you would trust me enough to come clean with me. But you didn’t. When I knew I was falling hard for you, I had to know. I had to know what you were hiding.” P.J. scrubbed a hard hand over his chin. “If that makes me an asshole, then I guess I am one. And if I’m gonna lose you now because of that, then maybe I deserve it. But if that’s where this is going, if that’s how it’s all gonna end with you leaving me, then I think…no, I know…I have the right to know why.”
Juliet searched P.J.’s eyes. If there was any deception there, she couldn’t see it. “You don’t know? You really don’t know?”
“No, there wasn’t enough time for Jules to explain.”
“But he knows.”
“Jules knows everybody’s secrets, and I am willing to bet my left nut that most of them are a hell of a lot worse than yours. As long as those secrets don’t hurt the club, he’ll take them to his grave. On my word, he’ll put everything through the shredder and we’ll never talk about it again.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah, babe. Just like that. Jules did tell me that you weren’t in any danger from your asshole ex, and that he is not someone to pose a threat to the club, that’s as far as we got, before you came around that corner. So, it’s all good.” P.J. told her. Then added with all the sincerity of a guy head over heels. “I love you, Juliet. Do you love me, too?”
