Page 57 of Rolling Thunder
Trent shifted tentatively, eyeing them both. “What the whore wants is to come home where she belongs and quit all this Suzy Homemaker bullshit,” he spat.
Evan tensed and lunged forward at the word whore, but this time, Kayla reached out her hand and stopped him. Her wild swirl of emotion had just settled into a frightening calm. Like how the leaves stop blowing in the wind right before a tornado.
“I am home,” Kayla retorted, and a flare of anger suddenly burst to life like a match dropped into gasoline.
Boldly, Trent began to climb out of the trunk.
“Come back to Fort Myers with me baby,” he said, his voice gentler, “and we’ll forget all this ever happened.”
This was his pattern with every fight they ever had—first he would call her a whore or some other awful name, cut her down until she believed she was unlovable. Then he would offer his twisted affection, and she would be desperate enough to take it. Not this time.
Evan steadied himself, watching Kayla’s response, ready to intervene if need be.
Rage boiled up inside Kayla like an erupting volcano. The love and acceptance that now lived inside her had been put there by Evan, Bill, and Annie. It was as if it were having a toxic chemical reaction, sending all the hurt, all the pain, all the demeaning, insulting abuse Trent had heaped on her over the years rushing up inside her. Her body rejected it entirely. She was about to explode. Her hand automatically reached for the nearest object. It hung conveniently on a nail. The Daniels Family Ass-Whacker.
Baby. The word seared into her soul.
Stabbing the air with it in his direction, she spat, “I’m not your whore. I’m not your baby!”
Outraged at her brazen defiance, Trent’s battered face turned red with rage and he lunged at her. There was no mistaking that he intended to beat her down and drag her back to the car in a heap like he had done a hundred times before.
Not this time.
Her focused anger made everything brighter, clearer. Time slowed down.
A deadly silence filled Kayla’s head. Her arm drew back fluidly. The crop whooshed through the air, cracking into the side of Trent’s skeevy face with astonishing force. His head spun sideways from the sheer might of it.
He cried out in shock and pain, stumbling backward. She pursued without reprieve, savagely slashing at his face over and over, crying out one word after another for emphasis as she did: “I’m. Not. Your. Baby!”
She was lost in a timeless space where every slight, every abuse, and every manipulation would be atoned for by the blows against his cowering body. For the first time in their lives, he was the one running from her. He was afraid of her. In a frenzied attempt to retreat, he stumbled awkwardly, falling into the open El Camino bed. She had him, and she wasn’t letting him go. The beating continued.
Sound slowly returned to her in a cottony muffled haze. Time resumed its normal pace. Her head cleared the same way the world comes back into balance after you stand up too fast. She slowly became aware of the primal screams of fury erupting from her own throat.
Hefting fifty-pound feed bags and wrangling horses meant she was no weakling, and the blows she rained down on Trent had real weight. It made her think of what Canyon Bill said about her… “You may be little, but you got a bite to ya.”
She paused, shaking so hard, the crop almost fell from her hand. Trent stared up at her, his hands partly raised in a reflexive defense. It almost looked like surrender.
Heaving furious breaths, she said, “You can crawl back to Fort Myers now, and we’ll forget this ever happened.”
She leaned in closer—his face was distorted with outrage and indignation. He’d never thought she’d fight back. Until now, she never had. She’d been completely under his control since she was fourteen.
“Or I’ll cut you up and feed you to the gators myself.”
There Trent cowered, arms up to protect his already battered face from the whip. Huge, blanched welts were rising on all the exposed skin of his face and arms.
The fact that the welts were shaped like tiny handprints brought up a bubble of maniacal laughter from her.
Trent still sat there, stunned, immobilized.
On a roll, she turned and marched over to the horse rack where more supplies hung. She hung up the Ass-Whacker and grabbed a much more formidable weapon. A twitch. It was a chain loop attached to a wooden pole used to twist a horse’s upper lip and compel it to stand still for a veterinary procedure. She turned back to Trent, menacingly brandishing this new implement of pain, which would undoubtedly do much more damage.
She slapped the wooden handle into her opposite palm, then stalked back toward him.
He threw up his hands and cowered. “All right!”
“You’ll go and never come back here?” she demanded.
“No! I… I mean… Yes.”