Hope Against Hope: The Hope Brothers Series (4 page)

“So,” he said, “how does it feel?”

“How does what feel?” I asked. He was standing so close to me, I could see the vein in his neck throbbing with his heartbeat. His brown eyes peered down at me, his gaze a little sleepy, and the faint scents of beer and marijuana wafted off of him.

His eyes were hazy, but they were still smolderingly sexy. You’d have to be dead not to be affected by the way Lee looked at you. His lashes were thick and long enough to make any woman feel a twinge of envy.

“Being twenty-one,” he slurred.

“It feels just the same,” I said. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Oh, come on now, kid, you are hardly a disappointment,” he murmured quietly, his gaze locked on mine. I tried to look away, but this was the first time he had ever looked at me like that. I’d seen him give other girls that look, but never me. I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

“Men will look at you differently now,”
Lora’s words echoed in my mind.

I swallowed hard, and took a deep breath. Lee reached up and pushed a strand of hair behind my ear.

“Well, you look a little different to me,” he stepped back and trailed those sexy smoldering eyes up and down my body. I wasn’t dressed up at all, in fact, I had just thrown on a t-shirt and jeans, but I was suddenly wishing I had put more thought into my appearance. “You look good, George. Real good.”

“Thanks,” I muttered, confusion beginning to set in. This was Lee. Lee Haggard. Someone I had known all my life, and now he was looking at me like this? Like…like I was a woman?

My heart sped up, and I bit my lip and tore my gaze away from his, thankful that I had managed to find the strength to do that.
I was just being ridiculous,
I thought. It was the beers. I was seeing something that wasn’t there.

My head was swimming with confusion when I looked back up at him. His lips landed on mine and I froze. He tasted like beer, but I guess I did, too. He began moving his mouth, kissing me hard, and instead of kissing back, I was motionless while my mind was spinning, trying to process what was happening, and how I was supposed to react.

This was Lee!

And that was Lee’s mouth. On mine!

What harm would one kiss do? It’s not like I hadn’t been kissed before.

I softened and began kissing him back, his warm, wet lips so strange against mine. He put his arms around me, pulling me in closer to his hard, muscular body. But he was kissing me too hard, so hard it hurt. When I felt his hand squeeze my breast roughly, I opened my eyes in shock.

What was he doing?
I wondered.

“No, Lee,” I said, pulling away and grabbing his hand with mine and pulling it away from my chest.

“What do you mean, no?” he snarled, pushing me against the wall and smashing his lips into mine again. I struggled against him, trying to push him off but he was twice my size, and he didn’t budge.

“Stop!” I said, tearing my lips away from his. “Please! Lee!”

His hand snaked under my shirt, grabbed hold of my bra and pulled hard until I heard the cloth rip and tear away from my body. His hand fell over my right breast again, squeezing hard.

I cried out as he began kissing my neck, his body pressing me against the wall so hard I couldn’t move.

“Lee, please, stop,” I cried. “You’re drunk, please…”

“No, Georgie,” he slurred, “I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”

“Lee, no!” I pushed up against him, but the weight of his body had me pinned securely to the wall. When he pushed my shirt up and engulfed my nipple with his mouth, hot, wet tears began falling down my face.

☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

“I can’t see the Haggard’s car behind us with all these balloons,” Ward said, as he maneuvered the car down the winding back roads that led back to the farm.

“Well, they really helped make everything festive, Ward,” Goldie said. “I wanted things to be special for George. You only turn twenty-one once.”

“I know, sweetie,” Ward said, squeezing his wife’s knee. “It’s not a big deal.”

Goldie put her hand over her husband’s, feeling a wave of gratitude wash over her. Her life was perfect. She had never dreamed she would be so blessed. Life as a child had been rough for her, stricken with poverty and the abuse that seemed to almost always come with it. But now, she had Ward and all the kids, and they had made a wonderful life for themselves. Now, the kids were all grown up and everything they had taught them over the years would pay off.

“I’m so excited for our trip to Hawaii,” Goldie said. The sky had fallen dark now and she stared up at the stars. “I bet you can see millions of stars there.”

“It’s going to be great, babe. As soon as the preliminaries are over, I’m all yours,” Ward replied. They had been planning this trip for months. “Even if you are making me go to Hawaii. I would have much preferred Montana, something a little more…country.” Ward and Crit had been bull riders for years, and Crit and Beau were competing in the Sugar Hill Round-up that was coming up next week. If they won, as was predicted, then they would advance to the finals, to the Texas State Championships in Houston in a few months.

“I’m making you go to paradise, and you’re complaining?” Goldie asked teasingly.

Ward looked over at his wife lovingly. All these years together, and she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on.

“It’s always paradise when I’m with you, my love,” he said, winking at her before turning his attention back to the road.

But it was too late. It was too late to swerve and miss the semi-truck that passed over into their lane. They didn’t even see it until its bright headlights were shining down on them.

When it was all over, their car lay torn to pieces, lying upside down in a mangled pile of twisted glass and metal, the wheels spinning in the air, as smoke rose from the wreckage.

The Hope’s bodies lay crumpled and lifeless on the bare asphalt.

Rising up into the inky blackness of the night sky, the red balloons peacefully floated towards the bright moon that lit up the devastation below it.

☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

SIX WEEKS LATER

As soon as I opened my eyes, reality came crashing down again. It happened every morning since my parent’s accident, since that awful traumatic night where my entire world changed in an instant.

I sighed and rolled over, putting the pillow over my head and wishing once more that it was all a bad dream. A bad dream that I hadn’t woken up to everyday for the last six weeks.

My brothers and I had numbly stumbled through the days that followed, trying to wrap our heads around losing the two people who managed to make us always feel safe and loved. Our entire foundation was shattered.

Crit was doing his best to hold everything together, and Seth, Jesse and I were doing as much as we could to help. Dad had taught Crit everything about the farm, so at least he knew how to keep the crops alive and keep the business running. I knew it was taking a toll on him, even if he tried to deny it. Crit was like a rock, though. If there was a crack in his armor, you’d never see it.

It was this fact alone that got me out of bed every morning. I was tempted to stay in bed all day every day and wallow in my misery, but I knew Crit needed help. There was so much work to be done, and I knew my parents would be devastated if we let the family business perish.

It was odd how life just kept rolling along after my parent’s death. As if the world didn’t have time to pause for reflection or grief.

After the funeral was over, nothing seemed to change, and yet everything changed. The crops continued to grow and flourish, lushly covering the field behind our house in perfectly growing rows of vegetables and flowers in various stages of life. Soon, it would be harvest time, and after dropping their nutritious life-giving bounty, they too would die off. Only they would have the amazing ability to recreate themselves and live again to produce over and over again.

My parents weren’t so blessed. They were gone. Where to, I wasn’t sure. I had never been one to blindly believe in heaven and hell. My brain processed things in a much more logistical way to enable that line of thinking. As far as I was concerned, nobody truly knew what happened after death, but the ones who were experiencing it. And so far, nobody had returned from the dead to let me in on the secret. I would remain agnostic until then.

Everything that used to seem so important paled in comparison to the tragedy of them being gone.

For the millionth time, I thought of Lee. It had been so weird seeing him the day of the funeral. I had kept my mouth shut about what happened between us. I had learned about my parent’s accident just hours after I had run into him in the cabin. There was no time, no right time, at least, to tell anyone. And when I finally saw him again at the funeral home, he seemed to not even remember anything. When he hugged me, I clenched up, but he didn’t even seem to notice.

He was drunk, sure. But you’d think he’d remember assaulting me and getting his balls kicked in when I finally came to my senses and stopped crying. It had taken me a second or two, but when I felt his hand start to slide down the front of my jeans, I knew that wasn’t the way I wanted this to go down. I slammed my knee up between his legs, and he fell to the floor gasping for air. I ran to the back bedroom of the cabin, locked the door and changed out of my torn shirt and bra. When I came back out, he and his truck were gone.

I didn’t see him again until he showed up at the funeral home. To be honest, at that point, I hadn’t given him too much thought because I was so overwhelmed with the tragedy of my parent’s deaths. But as time wore on in the last few weeks, he’d been in my thoughts a lot more.

And I was pissed.

I didn’t give a shit that he was drunk, that was no excuse for what he did. But after all this time, I still hadn’t told anyone, and even though I wanted to tell someone, at least Ruby, I still hadn’t found the strength to say the words.

I hadn’t seen him again since the funeral, but that was normal. Lee took off all the time on road trips or visiting friends. He seemed to stay away from his parent’s ranch as much as possible.

I sighed at the irony, and turned over to and stared up at the ceiling, all my dreams streaming across my mind like a shattered fairy-tale that I would never get to experience. Moving away was out of the question now. I was tied to the farm now. There were no other choices. I had given up my internship at the sanctuary so I could help out more here. It was the only right thing to do.

A soft knock on my door jarred me from my thoughts.

“Come in,” I said. Crit opened the door and walked in. He sat on my bed, the weight of his strong body sinking into my mattress.

“Hey, kid,” he said. “I made breakfast. You hungry?”

“I don’t know…” I said, my voice trailing off.