“What?”
“You heard me.”
“I know, but I was giving you a chance to take your words back. You can’t buy me a car.”
He waved his hand in an “I can’t hear you” gesture and pulled the door shut behind him as the toast popped.
I looked at Casey. “He wouldn’t really, would he? Buy me a new car?”
“We are talking about that piece of yellow scrap metal out there currently falling to pieces on the front drive?”
I sighed. “Yes.”
He shrugged and then grinned. “If someone said they were buying me a new car when I owned that, I wouldn’t complain. You know he lo—” He halted his words.
“Loves me?” I put down the butter knife and leaned up against the kitchen bench. “I know,” I said softly, feeling an idiotic smile creep over my face.
“Well that’s what you do for the people you love. You look out for them. Anyway, I’m glad he told you. I know he was worried about the whole assignment thing but I told him once he explained—”
“Wait…what? What assignment thing?”
Travis walked in the door and hung up the keys. He smiled at me. “You’re right, Quinn. Your car does hate you. Looks like it’s the rear seal. That’s gonna cost a stupid amount of money to fix because the engine will have to be removed to be able to replace it.”
That sounded bad. Really bad. He was smiling because it was just another reason for me to get rid of her and get something new and safe, but all that was beside the point.
“What assignment is Casey talking about, Travis?”
Travis froze, his eyes steady, the green in them dark as he stared at me. Something didn’t feel right, and I opened my mouth but nothing seemed willing to come out. My chest was starting to rise and fall a little faster in the silence. The fact that Travis remained motionless only escalated the feeling of unease.
“Travis.” My eyes pleaded with him to talk to me. “What assignment?”
Casey folded his arms and looked down at his feet. Travis shifted his eyes between the two of us.
“You.”
“Me?” I whispered, not understanding the hard edge in his voice.
He gave a single nod.
“What about me?”
“You’re our assignment.”
“You...you mean what, bodyguard duty since the whole Melbourne incident?”
Travis rolled his shoulders. The gesture was a nervous one that set my stomach churning. He lifted his chin and met my eyes. “No. Since the beginning.”
The world faded around me, blocking out everything but the guarded expression in his face. I opened my mouth but I couldn’t seem to form the next question.
“The AFP hired us to watch you. They’ve had feds on the inside of a crime group they’ve been trying to bring down for well over a year. These are the people that David is caught up with. When the AFP heard he was due out of prison, they assigned our firm to you.”
Casey cursed softly but I ignored it because my entire focus was on what Travis was telling me.
“Who…who is the AFP?”
“The Australian Federal Police.”
“The entire time you’ve been with me is because I’ve been an assignment?” I couldn’t breathe. What I had with Travis wasn’t real. His entire reason for being with me was a… a paid obligation. A job. A f**king duty. I licked my suddenly dry lips.
“To what, keep me safe?” My heart pounded as I tried to process what I’d been told. “All this time you knew I was in danger, and you didn’t say a word?”
“No,” Travis began and the hand that rubbed at his brow shook a little. “Not that…”
“Then wh…” Oh my God. My stomach turned over. “You weren’t assigned to keep me safe at all. Your job was to get information. You thought I was involved,” I said accusingly.
I should’ve known.
I really was stupid and just like Beth said, my life really was f**ked. She’d known it all along, but something inside of me that I’d squashed for so long had rebelled against the painful words. I’d been battling so hard to let go of my past. Then Travis had asked me to try. He had touched me so tenderly that I ached from it, and asked me to try. Yet all this time, not just Travis, but all of them, had suspected me of being involved, had been sitting back and waiting for what, me to give them an in? Prove myself as one of the bad guys? The thought was utterly ridiculous, and I might not have had many friends, but I knew what friendship was and this wasn’t it.
“Quinn, it’s not like that.”
Travis took a step forward, walking further into the house, and I took a step back. I barely noticed Mac and Henry both stumbling down the stairs.
“I might have kept things from you because I was scared of people I cared about getting hurt,” I told him, “but you lied to me. You sat there and looked right in my eyes when I told you I was scared, and you asked me to try. And I was so stupid, because I did. I tried,” I choked out. I blinked back burning tears because damned if I was going to let him see me cry. “But what was the point? Why would you ask that of me?”
“Quinn,” he whispered.
I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, and I fought against all the instincts that were telling me to run. Instead, I straightened my back and lifted my chin.
“I didn’t want to hurt you. If we hadn’t taken on the assignment, then it would have been someone else that—”
“Bullshit!” I yelled, balling my fists, because if he thought this wasn’t hurting me then he was a right f**king idiot.
He reached out a hand towards me, and I swatted it away. “Don’t touch me. I don’t need your excuses.”
“I didn’t trust anyone else with the assignment, dammit.”
I shook my head when he opened his mouth to say more. “So tell me what it is I’m caught up in. What is this AFP or whatever, trying to bring down?”
“Drugs and human trafficking.”
My head tilted back as I choked on a laugh of disbelief. “And you thought I would be involved in that? Poor little girl from the wrong side of the tracks, beat up by her stepdad half her life until she’s so damaged no one will ever want her. I’m just trash, right? The daughter that got thrown away and tried to take something back for herself. So what part was I involved in?” Some part of me was screaming at me to shut up, but the anger was spewing out and I couldn’t stop. “Was I handling the paperwork and making the bank deposits for the big bad crime lord? Or was I on the other side of the desk prostituting myself for the—”
“Quinn!” Travis barked. The vein in his neck pulsed angrily.
“You and I were a lie. All this…” I swept out a hand to indicate the duplex and everyone currently standing in it watching me break apart “…was nothing but proof of how little I belong in a world like yours.”
Travis shook his head, his eyes pleading. “We weren’t a lie, Quinn.”
“Don’t.” Travis had a way with words, somehow manipulating them to always sound like the truth and something I could believe in.
My heart squeezed painfully.
“Quinn. Look at me.”
I wanted to but I didn’t trust myself.
God. That night at the bar when I’d spilled my drink all down his shirt, it must have been all he could do not to laugh at how easy I’d made the assignment for him.
My eyes sought out Henry. His lips parted in shock, then Mac, her hand at her throat, and Casey, who just the other night had me believing my wish for a big brother might finally have come true.
“Quinn, please,” Travis pleaded, his voice hoarse. “Look at me.”
I didn’t need to look at him to know what he was feeling because the anguish was clear in his voice. I hated that I took satisfaction in hearing his pain.
“I can’t.”
Because I don’t see you. You’re not my Travis. You’re someone else. I don’t want to look at you and see a stranger.
Mac reached out for me, and I took another step back, my eyes focusing on her and her alone. “Mac…” I swallowed. “I quit.”
“You can’t quit. Travis!” she yelled. “So help me God, you better fix this.”
“No!” I blurted out. My eyes found Travis and I flinched. There was no colour in his face. “I don’t want this fixed. I just want to leave.”
I backed towards the door.
Travis took a step towards me. “It’s not safe. You can’t go out there.”
The air left my lungs in a huff of laughter, and I turned and kicked the side table next to the couch, sending it clattering across the floor. “I’ve never been safe!” I shouted through tears.
I stalked for the door and threw it open. Looking over my shoulder I saw Casey holding Travis back from coming after me. “No, Travis. You don’t get it. What it’s like for people like us to have trust shattered like that.”
I shook my head because in that moment that was how it felt. There were people like me and there were people like him and never should the two mix.
I made it out the front door and to the side of the house before I had to lean against the weatherboard for support. I’d never seen Travis so pale or his hands shake like that. I’d never heard an ache in his voice like it had been just before.
The front door opened and I closed my eyes, but the voice calling my name was Casey, not Travis. I dug my fingers into the pocket of my jeans and hurriedly yanked my car keys out. The only person I wanted to wrap their arms around me until it hurt to breathe was the one who’d just broken my goddamn heart.
“Quinn!”
I ignored Casey and unlocked the car door, sliding inside and jamming the key into Suzi-Q’s ignition with trembling fingers.
The passenger door swung open, and Casey jolted hard into the seat. The agony must have been clear in my eyes because he glanced away and said softly, “It’s okay, Quinn. Just drive.”
We were halfway down the street before I could let a breath out of my lungs. I felt Casey glance my way, but I kept my eyes on the road. He must have understood my need for quiet because he didn’t speak, allowing me to focus on calming the wild rage of emotion.
I pulled into a park by the beach and without acknowledging Casey, I dodged cars, making my way across the road to the rail that looked down a rock shelf and onto the beach. Spying a public seat, I sat down.
When Casey sat down next to me, I sighed.
“I just want to be alone.”
He rested his elbows on his knees. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“It’s so much better being alone.”
“Better or easier?”
The breeze fluttered over me, and I hugged my arms around myself. My eyes remained trained on the horizon. The waves were choppy, the beach quiet. “Easier.”
“You know you mean more to him, to all of us, than just an assignment, right?”
“I don’t know what to think. I keep getting the urge to run. Always, there’s the urge to run, but I don’t know what I’m running from. David? The bad guys? Travis? Myself? Who are the bad guys anyway?”