by Bethany Kane
“Sixty percent? But . . . how do you all make a living?” she asked Olive.
“It doesn’t take much to get by in Vulture’s Canyon. Our needs are few, and most of our food comes from the farm. We could donate more proceeds and time, but we haven’t been able to spread the word about Body and Soul as much as we’d like to help the organization grow. We have no one to really advocate for us with the government, the press and so forth. None of us are very good in the public eye,” Olive said a little sadly. Katie knew it was uncharitable to think it, but Olive’s news didn’t exactly surprise her. From what she’d seen so far, the residents of Vulture’s Canyon were a bunch of misfits.
“Oh, here’s your dinner.” Olive nodded toward the counter where Sherona had just set a large bag. Olive’s brow creased in confusion when she saw the animal fat from the burgers already creating a stain on the side of the paper sack. “You know, Sherona does have some amazing healthy items on the menu. Her vegetarian sandwich with guacamole, Monterey jack cheese, red onion and sprouts on homemade seven-grain bread is amazing.”
“Great, thanks. I’ll have to try that next time. Sounds like something Rill might like.”
Rill had seemed to make a point of excluding himself from her conversation with Olive by facing the counter, but he glanced at Katie and rolled his eyes when she said that. Katie ignored him. Who was he to make fun of her for her junk food diet when he’d lived off cereal and whiskey for a year and a half?
“So . . . are you and that man an item, Olive?” Katie nodded her head significantly at Monty, who was now sitting in a booth with another man she recognized as the camo-wearing, tattooed guy with the army haircut who was in the diner the first night she’d arrived. Hadn’t Sherona called him Marcus? He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt this evening, but Katie still thought he was likely one of those survivalist people who stockpiled enough supplies to live through an apocalypse and believed the government was responsible for everything from the swine flu to tracking individuals through electronic sensors in dollar bills.
“Monty?” Olive asked. “Yes, he’s my common-law husband.”
“He doesn’t like Maseratis,” Katie said before she tried to take a sip of her milk shake and couldn’t, because it was so thick. Awesome.
Olive laughed. “Did he tell you that?” She threw Monty an amused look over her shoulder. His shaggy eyebrows went up when he saw Olive’s glance. Katie also noticed that the survivalist guy was busy watching Sherona as she did her graceful dance of food preparation behind the counter. When he wasn’t staring at Sherona, he was throwing visual grenades at Rill’s back.
Note to self: don’t be so tough on camo-man. Perhaps he and Katie had something in common, namely that it made their blood pressure rise to see Rill and Sherona anywhere near each other.
“Sorry about Monty,” Olive said, still smiling when she turned back around. “He’s a social worker and this is one of the poorest counties in the state. He sees a lot of needy people and poverty on any given day. He tends to be a bit harsh in his judgments because of that.”
The milk shake didn’t seem so interesting to Katie anymore. She set it down on the counter, suddenly feeling self-conscious when she noticed Rill watching her from the corner of his eye.
Rill had always seemed to notice when she was embarrassed in social situations. It was one of the many reasons she loved him. Everett would blunder on like a typical male, clueless about her emotional state. Too many times to count, though, Rill had changed the subject with a segueing joke or a self-deprecating story, giving Katie a chance to regain her emotional footing. She used to appreciate his keen observance, but now she had reason to curse his sharp eyes.
She hopped down from the counter when Olive said good-bye.
“Come on, Errol. I’ll take you home. We’ve got to get that knee on ice.”
“I guess since you have your health food dinner, you won’t be back at the house for supper?” Rill said as she threw some bills on the counter.
Katie started to give a flippant reply about already having plans before she met Rill’s gaze and was caught. Their eyes locked only for a few seconds, but suddenly it all came back to her: the taste of his come on her tongue, how she’d struggled to keep up with his abundant emissions . . . the poignant sound of his climactic groan, like his soul was being ripped out of him with a giant hook.
She couldn’t quite interpret his expression. What in God’s name was he thinking of her, after what she’d done . . . after what they’d done? She hated herself for allowing it.
She wanted to do it again.
Awkwardness had never before been a part of her and Rill’s relationship. Now it seemed like the main component. What if she’d ruined their friendship forever?
And why had he decided all of a sudden that he wanted to talk to her?
She carefully refolded the paper bag and tried to master her anxiety. “I suppose I could still make you something with the supplies I got today. . . . What about rice pasta with an olive oil, basil and garlic sauce and some steamed asparagus?”
“I’ll pick up something here at the diner, but I want to talk to you later,” he said pointedly.
Katie glanced over at the statuesque Sherona. She was busy taking Marcus’s order, and he looked like he wanted to eat her more than anything on the menu.
“Fine by me,” she said briskly as she picked up the paper bag, doing her best to disguise her swelling nervousness. She’d hated avoiding Rill, but suddenly she wished they could go back to living in separate corners of the same house. Something told her that whatever he had to say wasn’t going to be good.
“I’ll be up the hill in an hour or so,” she said.
She marched out of the diner, Errol trailing after her. If Rill wanted to be fed by Sherona instead of her, well, more power to him. Chances were, Sherona was a lot more stable, grounded—she threw the paper bag in her hand a dirty look—and healthy for him than Katie was.
Eight
The first thing she noticed when she drove up to the Mitchell place was the smoke curling out of the chimney. Rill had built a fire for the past few nights, but he appeared to be doing it solely for Katie’s benefit. Every time she cautiously entered the living room, he was absent, leaving her to stare gloomily at the cozy fire in solitude.
Katie had no doubt about what Rill wanted to say. He was going to tell her they’d crossed the line. She’d gone too far. She’d ruined their friendship forever.
He was going to throw her out on her ass.
He looked up when she entered the kitchen. He stood by the counter. The glass he was filling with diet soda nearly overflowed before he glanced down and righted the bottle. He wore a pair of faded jeans and a dark blue collared shirt. Rill always had been able to wear jeans better than any man she knew.
“Do you want some?” he asked, holding up the soda.
“Yeah, okay.” Her awareness of him ramped up exponentially as she stared at his strong forearms sprinkled with dark hair while he prepared her drink. It was so strange to relate to Rill like this, to feel this awkwardness and straining tension.
He handed her the iced soda and nodded toward the living room. Katie followed him. Something felt as if it were coming to life in her belly and squirming around to get out. He sat on the worn sofa, and Katie perched on the edge a foot away from him. A friendly fire crackled in the fireplace, but the cozy ambience did nothing to still her nerves. She opened her mouth, figuring she should be the one to speak first . . . to apologize for the other night, but Rill cut her off.
“I called Morgan and Watkins today.”
Katie paused in the action of raising her soda to her mouth. Shock coursed through her at hearing Rill say her former place of employment. It’d been the last thing she’d expected him to say. “You . . . you did what?”
“I called Morgan and Watkins. I’ve met your boss, Steve Fedderman, at a couple parties at your mom and dad’s house. Did you forget that?”
“Forget i
t?” Katie sputtered. “I’ve had no reason to think about it one way or another, let alone forget it.”
His mouth twisted slightly in dissatisfaction at her answer. “Fedderman told me you handed in your resignation at Morgan and Watkins three weeks ago. You just became partner last year, Katie. Are you mad, quitting a job after you worked your ass off for years?”
Katie just stared, at a total loss for words.
“When were you planning on telling me you’d quit your job?” Rill asked intently.
“I . . . There hasn’t been a chance. We’ve hardly talked since I arrived.” She blushed when she recalled what they had found time for.
“I called your mom and dad, as well.”
She felt like all the blood rushed out of her head. “You didn’t tell them, did you? About my job?”
“About your lack of a job, you mean? What were you thinking, quitting your job like that and driving halfway across the country by yourself?” he demanded.
“Don’t accuse me of being irresponsible,” she retaliated, pointing a finger at him. “You’re the one who hasn’t had gainful employment for eighteen months now. If I want to take a couple months’ sabbatical from work, that’s my business.”
“You made it my business, as well, when you showed up on my doorstep, Angel.”
Katie went very still. Her breath burned in her lungs. Something had flashed in his eyes when he’d said . . . showed up on my doorstep, Angel. For an anxious few seconds, she thought he’d remembered what’d happened the first night she arrived. He’d never called her an angel before that night, and never had since. Her alarm faded when she noticed Rill seemed irritated and confused, but not suspicious.
“You told them, didn’t you? My parents?” she asked grimly.
“I can’t believe you’ve kept Stan and Meg in the dark about this.”
“Did you tell them about Morgan and Watkins or not?”
He gave her an annoyed glare and then took a sip of his soda as though he were trying to cool off his temper with the frigid beverage. “No, I didn’t. But I told them you were in Vulture’s Canyon. I told them I didn’t want you here, but you wouldn’t listen to me.”
“What did they say?”
“Your father just laughed,” Rill muttered under his breath. When he noticed Katie’s small smile of triumph, irritation flared in his eyes. “He laughed until I told him a woman wasn’t safe here in this house with me.”
“Safe?” Katie uttered before she snorted. “I’m sorry for having to tell you this, Rill, but you’re starting to have delusions of grandeur in regard to your foulness. That bathroom might have been a threat to my health before I cleaned it, but that’s the only risk to my safety I’ve encountered since coming to Vulture’s Canyon, unless potentially catching Barnyard’s fleas counts.”
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, clearly astonished. “And what about the other night?”
“I’m the one who took advantage of you. Not the other way around.”
He gave a bark of incredulous laughter. “So that’s the way you feel about it, is it?”
Her spine straightened. “Yeah, it is. You were vulnerable and I . . . I used that to my advantage.”
He shook his head slowly, his blue eyes gleaming in the firelight. “You’ve been my friend for sixteen years now, Katie—Everett’s little sister. And I let you suck me off through a half-closed door.”
The words seemed to hang in the still, warm air, dark, incendiary . . . arousing. Katie inhaled slowly, trying to ease the band of tension that had tightened around her chest.
“I’m still your friend, Rill,” she whispered.
“Friends don’t want to fuck each other blind.”
“You mean . . . you mean you want to?” she asked in a quavering voice.
“What d’ye mean?”
“Fuck me. Blind.”
“That’s not even the half of it, Katie. Not even a fraction,” he rasped. For a few seconds he looked so furious Katie was sure he was going to strangle her. The gravid tension in the room was so thick it felt difficult to draw air.
“Well . . . then why can’t we? We’re both adults.”
A puff of air popped out of his lungs. He shook his head and put his glass on the coffee table.
“Is there someone else?” Katie asked slowly when he placed his forehead in his hand and didn’t respond.
“Someone else?” Rill repeated bemusedly, lifting his head.
“Are you sleeping with someone?” she said through her teeth, irritated by his confusion. This was Rill Pierce, one of the most gorgeous, talented, virile men on the planet, as far as Katie was concerned. Surely he shouldn’t be so dumbfounded when she asked about his sex life. The idea of Rill being celibate was just . . . ridiculous. True, he’d never flaunted his sex life, never brought a parade of females to the Hughes house while he was still a bachelor. Her assumptions had more to do with what Rill was than anything she’d ever witnessed. He epitomized masculinity. He practicality oozed sex from his pores.
He rolled his eyes. “Vulture’s Canyon doesn’t exactly provide a wide variety of choices in that department.”
“You’re not sleeping with Sherona?”
“No. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’m not really up for wooing a woman at this point, Katie,” he snapped.
His frustration must have overcome him because he sprang up from the couch and began to pace on the far side of the coffee table. “I told you from the very beginning you don’t understand how I live. You don’t get what I’ve become.”
“I get what you wish you’d become!” Katie spat, standing and facing him. “You wish you were a robot. You wish you didn’t have any feelings at all, so you convince yourself that you don’t. You drown your grief in alcohol. You avoid people who care about you. You don’t care about your friends; you’ve abandoned your work and the people who rely on you. You pride yourself on your detachment. You claim not to give a damn about the people in this town, even. But you’re not cold and aloof, Rill; you’re just running. You’re scared that if you take a moment and really focus on the loss of Eden, your grief will swallow you up whole. So you’ve come here to the woods to hide, and meanwhile your grief gets the better of you even as you try and escape from it. It binds you like a prisoner. That’s what you are, Rill. You’re a prisoner in these damn woods, and you’re the jailer as well.”
He’d stopped pacing midway through her rant and now stared at her, his face glazed with shock, his mouth hanging open.
The words had flared out of her in one fierce, leaping blaze, but now that she’d said her piece, she felt empty . . . deflated.
“I won’t let you destroy yourself,” she said quietly. “I know Eden meant everything to you—”
“You don’t know what Eden meant to me,” he interrupted darkly. “You don’t know why I’m here in these woods.”
“What?” she asked sarcastically, her fury flickering to life if not blazing like it had a moment ago. “You’re the only one on this planet who knows what it is to love someone? You’re the only one who feels they’re in a living grave because they’ve lost that person?”
“You don’t know the meaning of love,” he shouted. “You don’t love anything but your fast car and purses so expensive they could support a starving village for a year. You’re a child.... You’re a fucking little girl, coming here and telling me how to live my life. You—preaching to me. Someone who quits her job on a whim and hauls ass halfway across the country for no good reason—”
“I’m thirty years old, Rill,” she interrupted, her voice trembling with fury. “I’m not a little girl. And I came here with very good reason.”
“A grown woman wouldn’t suggest something as ridiculous as us fucking each other.” His mouth slanted into a harsh line. “It’d spoil everything. Our friendship is probably already in ruins.”
“Then I guess the only direction we can go is forward.”
For several seconds they faced off in straini
ng silence, both of them breathing heavily.
“I think you’re scared of touching me because you know it won’t be sterile and safe,” she challenged.
“Cut your crap, Katie,” he muttered, his accent thicker than refrigerated molasses. He stared at the fire before he shut his eyes as though the flames had scalded them. “If you stay here, I’m going to have you soon enough. I don’t think I can control it. I’ll take my fill of you, too. I don’t think you have any idea what that means, the state I’m in.”
She slammed down her glass of soda on the table hard enough to make the liquid splash onto her hand. “At least if you were fucking me blind, you wouldn’t be drinking yourself into a grave.”
She didn’t glance back at him as she stalked out of the room. At that moment, she couldn’t stand to look at Rill Pierce a second longer. She vibrated with anger.
How dared he accuse her of not knowing what love was? How dared he accuse her of coming here on a selfish whim?
How dared he?
He stood beneath the spray of frigid water and reached for his drink. It was his first drink of the evening, and Rill knew it’d be his last. Neither a cold shower nor whiskey could dampen the memory of Katie sitting there in the fire-lit room. He was learning from solid experience Katie wasn’t expunged easily from his mind, period.
She’d been wearing some kind of stretchy gray skirt that hit her at midthigh and those supple leather boots that drove him nuts for some damn reason. The mild autumn had persisted. Her smooth legs had been bare. She’d looked as sinful as an unmade bed when she’d strutted into the diner this afternoon wearing that godforsaken skirt and a tight T-shirt that she’d knotted at the hip, her long, shapely bare legs on display for all the world to see.
When she’d sat down on the couch in the living room, the skirt had risen on her thighs. He’d resented the fact that he needed to talk with her about something as serious as her quitting her job—not to mention what he’d allowed to happen the other night—and all he could concentrate on was the tempting V between her legs. He knew firsthand the type of nonexistent underwear she wore.
