Better (Stark Ink Book 2) by Dahlia West Read Free Book Online

he’d gotten on sale but had grown to dislike. He was down to just the bare essentials now, having decided it was better to build his own furniture, slowly and with care, than to keep wasting money on cheap particle board.
    “There’s a guest bathroom down the hall,” he told her. “First door on the right. After that’s the spare bedroom, if… if you want to stay.”
    Zoey didn’t move. She simply stood in his entryway looking tired. There were dark circles under both eyes that nearly matched the bruise.
    Dalton wasn’t sure exactly what to do in this situation, so he stuck with the obvious. “Do you want to call the police?”
    That seemed to jolt her back to him. “What? No!”
    “I think you need to. You need to file a report and-”
    “Dalton, no!”
    “I know an ex-cop,” he told her. “I can give him a call. It doesn’t have to be hard. He can-”
    “I can’t do that,” she insisted. “I don’t want that.”
    “What do you want, Zoey? What do you want to do?”
    “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I just don’t know how things got this bad.” Her voice broke at the end as her bottom lip began quivering. Dalton didn’t know how things had gotten this bad, either. Zoey was strong and sassy, not this withered, worn out woman before him.
    “Why don’t you stay?” he finally suggested. “Just for tonight. I have the extra room. You can get some sleep. Maybe things will look different in the morning. It’s late. You don’t want to deal with your parents right now. You look tired.”
    “I am tired.”
    “Alright,” he said, as though that settled it. “Take off your coat and I’ll make you some tea.” He still had her old teabags, unable to throw them out in the move. He hoped they didn’t go stale.
    She put her hands on the buttons of her coat, but they remained there, unmoving.
    “Zoey, it’s late. You’re tired. I’m not… nothing’s going to happen tonight. You’re safe here.”
    She looked up at him with caution in her eyes. Then, much to his relief, she finally nodded. Slowly her fingers worked the large buttons of her coat, but her bottom lip never stopped quaking. Dalton waited to take her coat and hang it up for her. Maybe she could go to the bathroom and pull herself together while he made her tea. She looked… brittle.
    The last button came undone and, ever so slowly, she opened her coat. She watched him carefully as she slid it down her arms. Dalton forgot that he was supposed to reach for it.
    “Oh, Zoey.”
    The quivering lower lip finally cracked. She burst into tears. Dalton had always hated it when she cried. It aroused every instinct he had to protect her and make whatever was bothering her go away. Despite their estrangement and the past that still haunted them both, he reached out and took her arm. He pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her. Her head rested against his chest and her hands gripped his hips, desperately holding on to him. Her heavy, rounded belly pressed against him.
    “Oh, Zoey.”

Chapter Seven
     
    If Dalton hadn’t spent the last six months learning to fight off his urges before they overwhelmed him, he might very well have left Zoey where she stood, in his entryway, crying over her broken marriage. He would have driven all night to confront her sad excuse for a husband and broken him , instead. Before now, he hadn’t known it was possible to hate another person as much as he hated this man that he’d never met. It wasn’t hard to imagine a better world without him in it. Certainly Zoey was better off without him. Zoey and her baby.
    Jesus Christ , he thought as he held her and stroked her hair. Zoey’s baby .
    In a way he felt responsible for that as well. He’d apparently pushed her so hard that she’d met, gotten married, and gotten pregnant in the space of less than a year, probably all in an attempt to erase the memories he’d created for her. Perhaps she’d been so devastated at the loss of the future