Force: A Driven World Novel (The Driven World)
Brooke. She was there, waiting to run into my arms as soon as those doors opened. It felt wrong, holding her when the filth of the days prior still clung to me. But those feelings didn’t stop me from accepting her affections. It was the one thing I craved more than anything while I was locked up.“What do you think?” she asks softly, not turning to look at me. Moving closer, I get the first look at what she’s been working on for endless hours.
From this angle all I see is dark. Solid black bleeds into a deep blue, bleeds into gray.
It's so dark.
That thought alone is enough to have bile rising in my throat. Brooke isn’t dark.
She’s bright.
She’s shining stars in an inky dark night sky.
She’s hopeful sunshine after a rainstorm.
She’s not this mass of black and gray brush strokes.
“Do you see this?” She grabs my hand and pulls me closer, pointing to the center of the canvas. The closer I get, the more the picture begins to emerge. The dark slashes soften into misty swirls of blue. Getting my first glimpse of the full picture, I see the gray middle is softened into a pure white center.
“What is it?” My voice is grit. A rough croak that doesn’t hide how the last week has affected me.
“It’s us.” Her fingers squeeze around mine, and I cling to that feeling. She’s an anchor in the storm of my life right now.
“Us?”
She nods. Dropping the brush, she leans forwards and taps her fingers on the white center. “This. This is us.” It’s a whisper. “All of this”—she waves her hand around the darkness—“none of this other stuff touches us. Me and you. We're all that matters.”
It’s too much. It's all too much. The shit of the last few days. Having Brooke here holding me up despite it all is too much. I lose it for the first time, and tears fill my eyes.
I like to think I’m a strong man, but faced with the very real possibility that everything is going to be ripped away from me is suddenly too much. Wrapping her arms around me, I let myself have this moment. Burying my face in her hair, I let the fear win for just a few minutes.
***
“What time are the lawyers coming?”
We’re back in bed, my breakdown from earlier finally locked down, and Brooke is curled tightly to my side. Trying to sleep is pointless now, so we’ve been laying here, watching the sun start to peek over the horizon.
“Around lunchtime, I think.” I’m dreading today. I have a team of ridiculously overpaid defense lawyers chomping at the bit to get started on building their fight against Karlyn’s claims. There’s not a tiny part of me that was surprised it was her who’s trying to decimate my life.
She went to the cops and told them I forced myself on her the last night we were together. That what started as us fooling around ended in me not taking her ‘no’ for an answer. Somehow, she has pictures of herself with bruises. Well, that’s what the police have told me anyway. With there being months in between when she says I attacked her and her reporting it, there’s no physical evidence. It's pretty much her word against mine.
Except, the real kicker, she’s somehow found herself a witness that claims they saw us at the bar that night. They saw me not only being apparently rough with Karlyn, but Brooke too. That fucking night I thought she was on a date, and I lost my mind.
While it’s not proof that I did what she’s accusing me of, it’s proof enough that I’m an asshole who treats women like shit.
I’ve wracked my brain trying to remember every detail of that night. I know I didn’t do the despicable things she’s accusing me of. I know it with a bone-deep certainty.
She cooked me breakfast the next morning for fuck’s sake! And not to mention the endless phone calls and texts she sent me these last few months.
But even if I get lucky and they find me not guilty, my life is in the toilet. That bitch made sure the press got ahold of the story right after the police did. I’ll be lucky to ever get behind the wheel again. My sponsors dropped me in a heartbeat. I’m beyond lucky to have Colton and all of Team Donavan in my corner, but with a likely conviction and a jail sentence, I can kiss my life goodbye. Hell, even if I somehow get out of the charges, nobody will ever believe me. There's no smoke without fire. I can see the tabloid headlines already.
“I can hear you thinking.” Brooke’s voice cuts into my little pity party.
“Why are you here?” I feel her body stiffen at my question.
“Where else would I be?” she asks carefully.
“Anywhere but here would be better right now.” Her tiny fist lands square against my chest, shocking the shit out of me. Before I can ask what the fuck she’s doing, she swings her leg over mine and straddles me.
“Enough.” Gripping my face, she forces me to look at her. “We’re not letting her win.”
“She’s already won—”
“The fuck she has!” It’s horribly inappropriate, but I have the insane urge to laugh at Brooke’s heated declaration. This sweet, tiny thing who looks like a precious doll cursing and looking ready to go to battle is almost impossible not to laugh at. That urge dies on my lips as she keeps speaking. “Do you want to know why I left you before?”
“What?” I wheeze out, confused at the turn the conversation has taken. We haven’t really discussed the past. It didn’t matter to me. All that mattered was having her back in my arms where she belongs.
“You think it was because I hated you racing. You think I gave up on us, the future we had planned, because I was angry at you that night.” She swallows deeply, gathering whatever strength she needs