by Penny Reid
He pulled his hand from mine. “But it would, right? I’ve been arrested plenty of times, there’s plenty of photos for them to use. Plenty of sordid stories from my past. I would hurt your image and your career.”
I gaped at him, baffled by the unexpected direction of the conversation. “Don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about my image.”
He said nothing, but was gritting his teeth, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.
I was just about to reiterate that my image wasn’t at issue when he asked, “How bad?”
“What?”
“How bad would it be? Could you lose more film roles?”
I opened my mouth to respond but no sound came out. I didn’t want to lie and say no. The truth was I didn’t know because I hadn’t given the matter much thought.
But he took my silence as confirmation and cursed.
“Jethro—” I reached for him and he flinched away, startling me. I wanted to reach for him again, but it seemed my touch was now unwelcome.
A sharp, stabbing pierced my chest, my lungs rigid, inflexible. I couldn’t draw a full breath. I’d never seen him like this. He’d been angry during our first date, a bewildered, frustrated anger.
But this was different.
He was angry but also something else, unwieldy and dark. And he felt faraway, removed from me. He’d opened a chasm between us.
I tried again using a carefully calm tone, though panic made every beat of my heart painful and sluggish. “Jethro, it’s not about my image. I’ve never cared about my image, what people say.”
“Do you care about your career?”
I ignored his question. “This is about your privacy.”
His jaw ticked. “I’m taking you to the cabin.”
“Will you stay with me? Tonight?”
He shook his head but said nothing.
I pressed my lips together to keep my chin from wobbling, but couldn’t quite manage to keep my voice steady as I reminded him, “You promised me. You promised me that my celebrity wouldn’t send you running. You said I could trust you.”
“Sienna, this isn’t about your celebrity. This is about my past hurting your future.”
“Don’t do this.” I wanted to reach for him again, frustrated tears burning my eyes. “Stay with me. Stay the night, and we’ll talk it through.”
“Not tonight.” Jethro didn’t look at me when he spoke, but his voice was unrecognizable, hard and cold as granite. “I need time.”
CHAPTER 29
“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
― Kahlil Gibran
~Jethro~
“Time,” she echoed.
I made no move other than to turn left toward Hank’s cabin. I said nothing because I couldn’t speak, not yet. I was too angry, too frustrated. I couldn’t think past the string of curses and profanities hurling through my brain.
It didn’t matter how much I’d changed, how hard I’d worked to become something different, better than the garbage I’d been. My past was still hurting people, or had the potential to hurt, and this time it would be Sienna.
“You need time,” she said.
I didn’t like her tone.
She sounded hollow and anxious, close to tears. But I couldn’t do anything about her tone just now. I couldn’t find the wherewithal within myself to pacify and soothe, tell her everything was going to be just fine. I wasn’t a liar, not anymore.
I didn’t know whether or not everything would be just fine.
We pulled into Hank’s gravel driveway and I eased on the brake. I tried to ignore the sense of hopelessness as we pulled to a complete stop. Neither of us spoke. I was too busy trying to think of ways to obscure my past.
Maybe . . . maybe I could ask Cletus for help. Maybe he could figure out a way to remove all my arrest records from the law enforcement databases.
But that still left all the people who knew me growing up. That still left plenty of stories and willing storytellers, eager to share tales of my misdeeds. I didn’t blame them. I’d been the one to mess up my life. I’d earned every mortifyingly scandalous element of those stories. I was responsible.
And, of course, there was my father. If the picture he’d sent weeks ago was any indication, he’d be the first person in line to exploit our relationship. I heard his words again, the message on the photo, as though he were sitting in the truck with us.
You always were best at the big cons. I hope her bank account is as big as her tits. She can pay my legal fees.
I cursed under my breath, wanting to smash something.
What the hell had I done?
He was a loose cannon.
Shit.
Sienna deserved better. She didn’t deserve to be tarnished by association. She didn’t deserve to be linked to my father.
My job, as her man, was to take care of her, see to her needs and well-being. Not cause embarrassment, not be a stain on her reputation. Not make her job harder. I’d already darkened the lives of my own family. I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt her chances for success.
I couldn’t.
And I wouldn’t.
She cleared her throat, her hands balled into fists on her lap. “How much time do you need?”
I shook my head but didn’t answer. Instead, I exited the cab and walked around to her side, opening her door and offering her my hand.
She didn’t take it and made no move to leave the truck.
“Jethro,” she exhaled a broken sigh, “talk to me.”
I dropped my hand and met her pleading dark eyes, hating myself for putting sadness there.
“Just give me time,” I said, removed from the moment.
“What are you thinking?”
I tried to breathe in, but the tightness around my lungs didn’t permit it. “You know what I’m thinking.”
“You’re overreacting.” She jumped down from the cab, shut the door, and placed her hands on my shoulders, narrowing her eyes at me. “Nothing has to be decided right now. We can . . .” She paused, swallowing with effort, and when she spoke next her voice cracked. “I know it’s not ideal, but we can date in secret for a while, just until—”
“Hell. No,” I growled.
A visceral, vehement rejection of the idea pounded through my veins, setting my brain on fire.
I hated it. I hated lying. I hated denying and pretending.
Her hands dropped from my shoulders, her eyes widening by what she saw on my face. Sienna tried to take a step back, but the truck behind her halted her progress.
And it wasn’t just the thought of lying to everyone. Over the last weeks I’d given Sienna’s fame serious thought, but obviously not enough, not about things that mattered. She mattered. More than anything.
See, I’d been preoccupied with her status on countless dirty lists, like Beau’s for example. I’d come to a measure of peace with this reality. She was famous and beautiful, smart, funny, and sexy. Of course she was going to be on these lists. Of course men and some women would think about her in that way.
If being with Sienna meant thousands, if not millions, of people lusted after my woman, I could deal with that. Fine. Okay. So be it.
Just as long as the world knew she was mine.
Sure, my fixation on that aspect of her fame likely made me a blind caveman, a reactionary Neanderthal, but it was what it was. Among others, I suffered from the human conditions of jealousy and pride. I’ve never claimed to be perfect.
Nor have I claimed to be smart.
If I’d been smart, I would’ve considered how my past—how being with me—might affect her future.
“I’m so fucking stupid,” I grumbled. My forehead falling to my fingers. I stepped away from her, turned, giving her my back.
“I don’t care what anyone thinks.” Her voice was small, and I hated the sound of that, too. Hated that I was responsible for that as well.
“You should,” I said. “You’ve worked h
ard for what you have. You can’t throw it away just because you fancy a hick from backwoods Appalachia.”
“Jethro.”
I walked back to the driver’s side, each step feeling wrong though I knew they were right.
“Where does this leave us?” she called after me.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly, because I wasn’t ready to give up, but I couldn’t see a way forward. All routes were blocked by decisions I’d made a decade ago.
That was my fault. It was all my fault. And now I was finally paying the price.
***
“You’ve chopped all the wood.”
I didn’t look over my shoulder. I recognized the speaker. Billy. He was right. I’d chopped all the wood at the woodshed. And now I was swinging a double-bit felling axe at a pine some yards into the forest behind our house. I wasn’t even fifty percent into the trunk, though I’d been at it for over an hour. Nor was I ready to stop. Not by a long shot.
When I didn’t answer he said, “We don’t need more wood, Jet.”
I wrenched the blade from where it bit into the trunk and swung again.
“Jet?”
“Fuck off, Billy.”
Last night, after dropping off Sienna, I’d driven myself to the Dragon Biker Bar, the club headquarters for the Iron Wraiths.
I’d wanted a fight.
I’d wanted to beat the shit out of someone and have the guts beaten out of me.
Raising hell, getting drunk, getting high wouldn’t have felt good, but I had thought it had to feel better than the cavernous abyss of misery.
I didn’t go in. I couldn’t. My past may have lost me a chance with Sienna, but I still had five brothers and a sister. I hadn’t lost them. They’d given me a chance. I couldn’t let them down.
But I could destroy a tree.
Billy didn’t leave. “What did you do to the carriage house?”
I didn’t respond.
“It looks like someone took a sledgehammer to your new framework.”
“Fuck. Off.”
He sighed. I sensed his presence behind me, standing silently, while I took satisfaction in the jarring pain running up my arms every time I buried the axe into the trunk.
Then a second voice spoke. “Jethro, did you chop all the wood?”
Cletus.
I sighed, shaking my head.
Cletus continued, “We don’t need all that wood. What are we going to do with a split pile of wood that big? It’s like you’re inviting termites over for tea.”
“I asked the same thing,” I heard Billy whisper, “and he destroyed the upstairs framework in the carriage house.”
“I can hear you, dummy.” I pulled the blade from the tree and glared over my shoulder, finding my brothers frowning at me. “Can you hear me? I said—”
“Fuck off. Yes. I heard you.” Billy’s tone was flat, aggravated, but he didn’t budge.
Cletus glanced between us, a thoughtful eyebrow raised. “I take it something happened with Ms. Diaz?”
I slid my eyes to Cletus, grinding my teeth, but said nothing. If I spoke, a string of curses would erupt like a volcano. I still hadn’t beaten the shit out of anyone, but the day was young. And Cletus was a good fighter.
As though reading my mind, Cletus stiffened. “You will do no such thing. I haven’t had breakfast yet, and this is my best smoking jacket.”
“Then leave.”
Cletus grunted, his mouth a flat line, then threatened, “If you don’t tell me what happened, then I’ll pay a call to Ms. Diaz and—”
“You won’t,” I ordered sharply, taking a step toward my brothers.
Cletus raised his hands between us as though warding me off. “Then tell me what happened.”
“What’d you do to her?” Billy lifted an eyebrow, his gaze cold and assessing and irritating as hell.
“I did nothing,” I seethed between clenched teeth, tossing the axe to a nearby stump so I wouldn’t throw it at Billy’s head.
Billy’s frown intensified. He clearly didn’t believe me. Judgment was written all over his face, and in that moment I hated him.
Without thinking I asked, “What’d you do to Claire?”
Billy flinched, the stone steadiness of his expression cracking with surprise. “What?”
“You heard me.” I wiped the back of my hand across my brow. “What’d you do to her? Why does she hate you so much?”
Billy blanched as though I’d sucker-punched him, and I was immediately remorseful for asking the question.
This, what I was doing, the mind games, the lashing out, wasn’t who I was. Even at my worst, I’d never done this shit. This was my father; this was how he operated.
And now I hated myself, too.
Before I could apologize, Cletus stepped between us. “This ain’t about Billy, this is about you deforesting the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for superfluous firewood, firewood that’s about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. Now, I’ll ask you again, what happened with you and Sienna?”
The fight drained from me, leaving my body tired and my head pounding and my chest hurting. “We’re over.”
The words felt final and wrong, rang empty and desolate, hung heavy in the stagnant summer air.
I’d been repeating them to myself, trying them on, because I couldn’t figure a way around the mountain of my past. But I also couldn’t let her go.
And because I was growing desperate, I was also trying on her idea of dating in secret. Unfortunately, that suggestion, thinking on the ramifications of it, led me to destroying the upstairs framework in the carriage house. So I’d moved to the woodshed.
Maybe by the time I cut down this tree, I’d be more at peace with her proposal of a concealed relationship.
“Fuck.” I shook my head. “Maybe we’re not over. I don’t know.”
Cletus placed his hands on his hips. “Why are you over? Did something happen at Daisy’s?”
I shook my head. “No. She got a call from her sister on the drive back. Sienna has a . . . a thing. A movie premiere in London she’s got to go to this week, and she needs to bring a date.”
Cletus scrutinized me, as though he expected me to continue. When I didn’t, he prompted, “So? What’s the problem?”
“So . . .” My gaze flickered to Billy. He was back to stonewalling me, his arms crossed, his mouth a rigid line. “So, it can’t be me.”
Cletus tsked impatiently. “Why can’t it be you? You got plans or something? A cake to bake?”
“Because, Cletus, then everybody would know about us. Because, if we go public, then news people will dig into my past. And how do you think America’s sweetheart is going to look saddled with me? An ex-con named Jethro, from backwoods Appalachia, with a GED and an album full of arrest photos.”
Cletus’s frown was severe, fuming. “You’re not an ex-con. You were never convicted.”
“Same difference. I didn’t get caught, but I did it. We all know I did it.”
Cletus’s eyes moved over me. “So she broke it off.”
“No.” I shook my head, a humorless laugh tumbling from my lips. “I’m breaking it off. I’m going to have to break it off.”
“You?” Billy asked abruptly, another fracture of surprise in his granite-like expression.
“Yes. Me.”
“Why?” Billy pressed, clearly captivated by my words.
“Because I can’t do that to her,” I ground out between clenched teeth, yelling at him, feeling wretched all over again, angry all over again, hurting all over again. “I can’t wreck her career, her image. I can’t do that. You don’t do that to someone you lo—”
I was about to say love. I turned, gave them my back.
You don’t do that to someone you love.
Damn it all to hell, but I was in love with Sienna Diaz.
Falling for her had been like breathing. Natural, easy, necessary. Inescapable. And the thought of spending the rest of my days without her had me drowning in pa
nic.
Cursing, I moved to pick up the axe but was intercepted by Cletus. “Whoa. Wait. Wait a minute.” His hands were again held out between us, his eyebrows suspended over concerned eyes. “Now hold on. What did she have to say?”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What she wants doesn’t matter?” he baited.
“I didn’t say that. Of course what she wants matters.”
“Then what does she want?”
I shook my head, closing my eyes. “She doesn’t want to invade my privacy. And she wants us to date in secret.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“She’s focused on what this means for my privacy. She’s worried I’ll have no privacy; that I’ll be giving up too much. So she wants us to hide our relationship.”
“And you’re not worried about that? About your privacy?”
“God, no.” I opened my eyes, my words forceful. “I don’t care about that. I’d gladly give up my privacy if I could be with her, but not when my past is going to—”
“Tarnish her image, yes. I know,” Cletus finished for me, waving my words away, a frown etched into his features.
“And it’s not just hurting her career. You saw that photo Darrell sent. You read his note. Do you think our father is just going to leave us in peace?”
“No,” Billy answered honestly for both him and Cletus. “He’ll try to exploit the hell out of you. He’ll try blackmail; he’ll try everything.”
“Don’t you worry about Darrell Winston.” Again Cletus waved this concern away. “I can deal with Darrell Winston. Forget about him. I got him under control.”
“How can I be sure?” I pressed my brother. “This is Sienna. I can’t take any chances.”
“Jethro Whitman Winston,” Cletus’s eyes were flinty and stern, “you’re going to have to trust me. Let it go.”
We glared at each other. I didn’t know if I could let it go.
But then he ground out, “Have I ever let you down? Have I ever failed to keep a promise? I’m telling you. Let. Me. Deal. With. It.”
I gritted my teeth. Cletus was right. He was sneaky and sinister, mean even, but his word was sacred. In the end, his meanness was why I ultimately trusted him to deal with Darrell.
