by Bethany Kane
“You can come up to my place and get rested up for your drive back to California. You’re not welcome here, though. I want you gone as soon as you’re rested,” he said stiffly.
She stalked past him toward the nurses’ station, wondering why having Rill say out loud what she already knew with perfect clarity could hurt so damn much.
Rill made a phone call before they left the hospital. Katie heard him telling the person on the other end about Errol’s injury. Fifteen minutes later, they dropped a tired, pale-faced Errol off at his house and left him in the care of a woman in her sixties who was dressed like she was on her way to a Grateful Dead concert. Her name was Olive Fanatoon, and once Katie got past her hippie apparel, she realized she was a sweet, soft-spoken lady.
“Is Mrs. Fanatoon a relative?” Katie asked Rill as they walked out to their cars. Katie and Errol had followed Rill to Errol’s. The tiny house itself was in disrepair, but it was ideally situated on the serene, thickly wooded banks of the Ohio River.
Rill shook his head. Katie could tell by the way he didn’t make eye contact that he was still irritated at her. “No, but she’s taken care of Errol on and off since he was a baby. Every adult in Vulture’s Canyon, and most of the teenagers as well, takes turns watching out for Errol, but Olive pitches in more frequently than most.”
“Do you take a turn?” she asked as she reached her car.
Blue eyes flashed at her. “No. I don’t belong to this town.”
“Right. Silly of me to ask. You’ve got much more pressing matters to see to, like drinking yourself into oblivion, for example,” she said as she flung open her car door.
She pulled out of the dusty dirt road that led to Errol’s and onto the rural route, her wheels squealing on the blacktop. She imagined hauling ass up to the Mitchell place and finding a shower and a place to sleep before Rill even had a chance to make his way through her dust.
It galled her to have to pull over and wait before she hit the main road, because she’d recalled why it was so critically important for Rill to believe this was her first time visiting his house. She couldn’t traipse up the hill like she owned the place.
Tears burned in her eyes when he barreled past her in his sedan without a sideways glance. She couldn’t help but contrast his cold aloofness with the scorching memory of him pressed to her backside, his mouth hungry and hot on her neck, his gruff whisper in her ear . . .
Open up, baby. I’ve waited for this for so damn long.
She shivered despite the heat of the early autumn day. Holy shit. Can’t you even console an old friend without ruining everything?
For a few seconds, she felt like something volatile was going to burst right out of her chest, but then she sniffed and determinedly pulled her car onto the road. So what if on an impulse she’d quit her job, driven across the country, run over a town resident whom she’d now have to provide for medically with a quickly dwindling bank account, fucked the man she was supposed to be consoling and then offended him by speaking his dead wife’s name out loud?
“At least you’ve got your health,” she muttered grimly before she turned onto the main road and started up the hill where Rill lived.
Four
By four o’clock that afternoon, Rill was ready for a drink. He’d been confused and worried by Katie’s initial phone call, infuriated when she threw her sauce in his face at the hospital and on low boil since she’d hauled an enormous Louis Vuitton suitcase up the front porch stairs and burst through the screen door.
“Don’t bother to help. Really. I’ve got it,” she snarled as she rolled the monstrosity of a suitcase down the wood-floored hallway. The noise she made was loud enough to wake the dead. Rill leaned against the counter, silently fuming as she opened door after door in the downstairs hallway, knowing full well the only other bed in the house was upstairs. When she’d opened up the last door, and he heard the suitcase clacking down the length of the hallway, he cursed under his breath and charged after her.
She said nothing when he grabbed the suitcase and stomped up the stairs. It was hot and sticky in the dormer bedroom, so he flipped on the window-unit air conditioner before he tossed Katie’s suitcase onto the bed. It bounced up six inches before it settled.
“The shower up here doesn’t work. You’ll have to use the downstairs bathroom.”
He’d been hyperaware of the sounds of her moving around the house since that moment of rude welcome. Her presence there bothered him more than Everett’s visit several months ago, and he’d been perturbed enough by Everett being in Vulture’s Canyon.
For some reason, he kept matching up the image of Katie in his mind to the sounds in the house. He saw the bounce of her long, lush curls when he heard her quick step on the stairs; he imagined the scowl on her face when she walked into the bathroom and noticed the state of it.
In the silence that followed, he clearly pictured her unbuttoning her jeans and peeling off tight denim to expose the juicy, succulent flesh of her hips and ass.
When he’d realized the direction of his thoughts—when he recognized he’d trained an ear down the hallway, eager for more cues of what she was doing in the privacy of the bathroom—Rill grabbed a bottle of cold water from the fridge and stomped out the back door.
He really was turning into a degenerate.
An hour later, he felt more than a twinge of guilt when he recalled how pale her face had been when she’d followed him upstairs to that hot dormer bedroom. It was Katie, for Christ’s sake; sweet, generous, brave Katie, whose inner flame had always drawn him. She may have been completely misguided by thinking she should come to Vulture’s Canyon to save him, but her heart was in the right place.
Katie’s heart was always in the right place.
He ran down the hill to the market in Vulture’s Canyon while she napped. They didn’t have much at the Dyer Creek Trading Company, but there was enough to get by in a pinch. He figured he should at least feed the girl after she’d rested and before he politely sent her on her way.
While he was placing pasta, pasta sauce, rice, fresh-baked bread and cereal in the pantry, he noticed his whiskey supply was gone.
His regret over the way he’d treated Katie earlier dissipated in an instant.
He’d thundered halfway up the stairs, ready to haul Katie’s butt out of bed and give her a piece of his mind, when it suddenly struck him what he was doing. He pulled up short and plunged back down the stairs. His shirt fell to the kitchen floor. He shucked off his socks and hiking boots at the foot of the back stairs. His jeans were left in the grass about halfway through the backyard.
The water in Dyer Creek was probably at its warmest temperature of the year, but it was still cold enough to make him grit his teeth when it came up around his balls and then his belly.
His head went in next, and damn if it just wasn’t what he needed. He kept his head underwater until the incendiary fantasy of strangling a good friend because she’d gate-crashed his solitude and bogarted his whiskey slowly receded. When he pulled his head out of the cold, clear water, he heard a loud shriek and a choking noise.
“What the hell’aw you doing?” he bawled.
Katie paused, thigh deep in the water, and spit a tendril of hair out of her mouth, her green eyes wide in disbelief at his question. “What does it look like I’m doing?” she yelled at the same time she winced and yanked up a foot, nearly losing her balance. The rocks may well be smooth in the creek bottom, but they were plentiful. “I’m trying to save a crazy man from drowning himself! Rill?” she asked, staring at him like he truly was the lunatic she’d accused him of being.
Rill blinked, realizing too late he’d been gawking at her breasts through the thin fabric of the tank top she wore.
He wouldn’t have been a guy if he hadn’t noticed before that Katie possessed beautiful breasts, large in relation to her compact body, but high and firm. It’d never shamed him before to consider Katie attractive, because he knew admiration was as far as his attentions wo
uld ever go. He knew that because he’d set a firm limit on himself, and when it came to sex, Rill was steadfast in his selfimposed limitations.
It was one of his only true virtues.
First, Katie’d been Everett’s little sister, and decent guys were careful about respecting that sacred domain. Then she’d been Eden’s best friend.
Besides, Katie wasn’t his type. She was a force of nature: a whirlwind, a golden beach that stretched for an eternity, a gypsyspirit in designer jeans.
She looked downright indecent standing there in all her splendor, a majority of that pale gold skin exposed to the sunlight, her hair falling in wild curls. His hands prickled with a need to grasp that glorious mess, to tangle his fingers in it. Her breasts heaved, her nipples clearly outlined against nearly nonexistent fabric.
Rill experienced a potent surge of lust followed by a pang of shame. The shame wasn’t enough to block out a desire to pick Katie up, lay her on the banks of the creek, strip her bare and consume her with the hunger of a wolf who hadn’t fed in months.
His lurching cock tugged at his conscience. God. He’d thought he’d successfully quieted the animal inside him, but apparently all he’d done was strengthen it with his abstinence. Lust tore through his veins like a potent drug.
“Go inside, Katie.”
She blinked. Even to his own ears, his low command had sounded ominous. She opened her mouth, just like he knew she would. Katie couldn’t keep her mouth shut if a torpedo streaked straight toward her head. He stepped toward her.
“Inside.”
This time he’d gotten the message across in spades. She turned abruptly in the chilly water, cried out in surprise, and went straight down. He caught her before her chin hit the water, but the rest of her was submerged. He heaved and she came out of the creek with a loud sucking sound and a squawk.
“Jaysus,” he fumed at the feeling of a wet, stiff-nippled breast pressing against his bare chest. He marched out of the creek and through the yard with Katie in his arms, his gaze trained on the house, refusing to look at her as she commanded him to put her down.
Blood roared in his ears and pounded into his cock. Why, he had no idea. Katie Hughes wasn’t his type. She wasn’t. Rill preferred quiet, elegant women. He’d had enough of blatant, earthy sexuality from his mother, who had dragged him from one man’s house to another when he was a child, their rent paid by his mother’s spread thighs.
Not that Katie was like his mother. She wasn’t at all. He was just worried he was.
In the distance, he heard shouting in his ear, but he existed in a thick fog of impenetrable lust and fury.
It infuriated him to hold a wet, nearly naked Katie in his arms and consider his mother. He was not like her. He may drown his sorrows in alcohol when the mood struck him, but unlike many of his friends and coworkers, Rill had never been ruled by his prick. My fucking, aching, chubbed-up, traitorous prick, he added to himself furiously.
The cry Katie made when he tossed her onto her bed in the dormer bedroom finally pierced his anger.
She lay on her back, her elbows propping up her upper body. She stared up at him with huge eyes, her breasts and belly heaving in agitation, her legs parted. Wetness gleamed on her smooth skin. He stood over her at the side of the bed, breathing heavily, watching as her gaze lowered over his torso.
He was hard enough to pound nails with his cock, and there was nothing he could do to stop her from seeing it. His boxer briefs clung to him like a second skin. Rill didn’t need to look down at himself to know his erection was about as obvious as a servicing bull’s.
He jerked his gaze off the sight of her tiny, thin, wet shorts clinging to a well-trimmed triangle of pubic hair and outlining succulent-looking sex lips. He should be shot point-blank just for thinking about what he wanted to do to her in that volatile moment.
Her expressive eyes told him that she knew he fought with his baser instincts. The hint of anxiety he saw in irises that were the color of a newly opened, green leaf caused a wave of self-disgust to flood him. When he pointed at her, his hand shook.
“I want you out of this house, Katie.”
He turned and stalked out of the room without another word.
The night passed, and then another day, and still Katie couldn’t get Rill to sit down and speak with her. His withdrawal left her feeling even more anxious than she had been after the creek incident.
And after having sex with him, of course.
On the morning after her arrival, she’d left when Rill disappeared into the woods. She’d driven down to Errol’s house to check on him. Once she’d assured herself that he was properly using the passive motion machine they’d given him at the hospital, which helped to keep his knee joint limber while he began to heal, she headed back to the hill.
Instead of isolating himself in the woods this time, Rill had taken refuge in his bedroom.
She’d spent the better part of the day making the place livable again. The house really was nice once one got rid of a year and a half’s worth of the dust and grime of Rill’s depression. She’d been making the beautiful wood mantel gleam with furniture polish and considering what she could make them for dinner when she heard Rill in the hallway.
“Rill?” But he never answered her call, just headed out of the house. Katie had heard his car start up before she reached the screen door.
Almost two hours later, she waited in the shadows of the wraparound porch sitting on a rusty wrought-iron chair. Darkness had just fallen, slow, silent and all-consuming. The creatures in the trees and fields had ceased their clamorous communications. The dim kitchen light barely penetrated the thick shadow of night.
Had Rill found her presence in the house so disturbing that he’d left town, perhaps? What if her being there had made him more desperate . . . more impulsive, and he’d done something crazy and dangerous?
She stood. She’d promised herself she’d wait until nightfall before she went to try to find Rill. The time had come, but uncertainty stilled her feet. He would only resent her more for seeking him out . . . for treating him like he was a delinquent fifteen-year-old. No matter how much she wanted to, Katie couldn’t make Rill see reason.
She couldn’t force him to snap out of his grief.
Helplessness didn’t sit well in Katie’s belly.
She heard a vehicle’s motor in the distance. Her heart pounded into overdrive when she saw headlights cast on the grove of trees that lined the road.
The car door shutting sounded abnormally loud in the still night. A dog in the far distance must have thought so, too, because it started barking a warning.
She assumed Rill didn’t know she was there as she listened to his heavy footfalls on the steps and front porch. He paused a few feet away from the screen door, though, his head lowered.
“What am I going to have to do to get you to go, Shine?” he asked quietly.
“I’m not going,” she replied softly. Firmly.
He sighed. With a hitch in her chest, Katie realized he had known she was there. Somehow. He hadn’t been talking to himself. When he didn’t respond, Katie took several cautious steps toward him.
“Are you drunk?” she asked bluntly.
“No.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Down t’ the pub,” he replied.
“I thought you said you weren’t drunk.”
“Jaysus, Katie. I didn’t even finish my second beer. I hardly think it qualifies.” He turned and plunked down on the top step.
Katie approached and sat at the opposite end. She swallowed, trying to tamp down the unpleasant feeling of helplessness lurching around in her gut.
“You don’t really think the people who care about you are going to stand idly by and watch you kill yourself, do you?” she asked.
“I’m not trying to kill myself,” he muttered. “All I want is to be left alone.”
“You’re self-destructing, Rill.”
“I’m living alone because I choose to. I pay
rent. I’m not breaking any laws by getting myself good and ossified once in a while. I can’t see how you have a say in it one way or another,” he said, frustration heavily lacing his tone.
Katie bit off her aggressive reply. She took a deep breath and stared up at the night sky. A low cloud cover obliterated the light of the stars.
“How did you ever end up in this place, anyway?”
For several seconds, she thought he wasn’t going to answer.
“My plane got grounded in St. Louis during a storm on a trip from New York to Los Angeles,” he said quietly after a moment. “I got off the plane, rented a car and drove.” She saw the shadow of his hand going up in a vague wave. “This is where I ended up.”
“An eighteen-month-long layover?”
He shrugged.
“You said you’d been coming from New York. Had you been visiting Eden’s grave in New York?”
Katie saw him tense.
“She was my friend in addition to being your wife, Rill. I’m not going to go around refusing to say her name. That’s no way to honor her memory. Is that where you’d been? Before you came to Vulture’s Canyon?”
“Yah,” he replied, almost inaudibly, after a moment.
Katie had been to the cemetery in the Hudson River Valley where Eden Pierce had been buried. Eden had been visiting her parents while Rill was filming in London. She’d been driving home from a meeting with an old school friend when a sleeping truck driver veered across the centerline, hitting Eden’s car. She’d spun out of control and flipped into a deep ravine at the side of the road.
They said she’d still been alive for several minutes, but pinned against the seat and the steering wheel. The bloody fingerprints on the window, the smashed door and the handle indicated she’d been trying to get out before the air in her collapsed lungs ran out.
“I miss her, too,” Katie said softly.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Katie. You don’t know what’s happening inside me.”
Her chin tilted up defiantly, but inside, she felt herself wilting. His grief seemed insurmountable at that moment. Was she delusional, thinking she could actually help him when he obviously didn’t want it? She suddenly knew that the unbearable burn she felt in her chest—an explosive, frightening feeling—was precisely what Rill experienced in the silence; it was a sympathetic pain.
