He felt Sam place a hand on top of his. “Also, in situations like Josie’s, shame is an ongoing thing. Sometimes, even after a woman manages to get out of an abusive relationship, she’ll beat herself up for years with blame. She’s not necessarily going to want to explain how she’s feeling or why she’s feeling it, especially to someone she’s dating.”
His mind reeled, trying to take all this in, even as more and more things started falling into place. That was why Josie had screamed when he grabbed her last Saturday. That was why she’d sounded so distant when he asked her to come straight home from the grocery store. And the thin scar on her breast…
“Where is she?” Beau asked. The need to talk to Josie felt like it was burning a hole in his chest.
“I’m not done,” Sam told him. “There are other things we should go over—”
““I need to talk to her,” he said, yanking his hand away.
“You don’t understand—”
“I do understand,” he said, trying to calm down. “But you don’t understand that I can’t talk to you because she thinks she can’t talk to me. She sent you because she’s afraid of me. That’s why I need to talk to her. I need her to know she can tell me anything. Anything and I’ll still—”
He broke off.
He felt Sam’s gentle hand on his shoulder. “You’ll still love her. That’s what you were about to say, wasn’t it?”
He shook his head. He was done talking to Josie’s best friend. “I need to talk to her.”
A pause, then Sam’s hand came off of his shoulder. Next he heard a tapping noise that he could only hope was the sound of her texting Josie.
“GIRL.” SAM’S MESSAGE BLINKED onto Josie’s phone a mere ten minutes after she heard Beau making his way downstairs from the confines of her little room.
“That bad?” she texted back.
“He says he won’t talk to me, only you. If you want, I can tell him it’s me or nobody else, but I think he wants to apologize for whatever went down between you two.”
Josie nearly wrote back, “Prescotts don’t apologize.” But then she realized she was not only putting Sam in an awkward position, she was treating her like a high school go between. “Okay, I’m coming down,” she texted. “You can go.”
Next came some more back and forth texts, with Sam asking her if she was sure several times, then turning around and texting, “Okay, but you had better call me later with details. Dude is waaay sexier than I was prepared for. Luckily he’s blind or he would have seen my day-um! face when he walked in all shirtless and yummy looking.”
Josie chuckled. Leave it to Sam to pull a joke out of the situation, even one as intense as this.
As if reading her mind, a new message popped up on her phone. “You think I’m joking, but I’m not.”
Josie sucked on her teeth and typed. “I will call you later, Sam. Now pls go. And thanks.”
Sam must have taken her at her word, because when Josie entered the kitchen, Beau was sitting at the table alone.
“Beau,” she said.
But that was as far as she got before he was out of his seat. He lurched toward her, gripping the nearby island counter, then one of the bar stools, then walked forward without support.
Josie, having never seen him navigate a room blind, watched mesmerized.
But the scene didn’t last long. He snatched the air a few times, found her shoulder, and dragged her into his arms.
She could feel him breathing heavily against the top of her head. “You should have told me,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “But I couldn’t.”
He gripped her even tighter. “I’m not him, Josie. I would never hurt you like that. No matter how angry I get, I would never lay a hand on you.”
“I know,” she said. Because despite the times she had been afraid of him, and as angry as she had gotten with him, she knew deep down in her heart Beau wasn’t like Wayne. He’d never hit her, and unlike Wayne, he would never pretend to be her Prince Charming. He was Beau Prescott, amazing lover, ridiculous asshole, and he’d never pretended to be anything else. “I know you’re not him,” she said.
He rocked her in his arms for a few beats. “Any chance of you telling me where your ex-husband lives or are you going to make me have Mac Google him?”
“According to the text I got from Mac this morning, you fired him,” she reminded him. “And he’s not my ex-husband.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, pulling back from her. “Are you still married to that bastard?!”