Wild at Whiskey Creek

by Julie Anne Long

  She stopped fidgeting with the coaster. “Huh.” She sounded faintly surprised.

  “Where do you suppose they got that notion?”

  She shot him a sidelong glance, clearly contemplating hedging. Glory was stubborn as hell, but she also knew his nickname was the Wall for more than one reason. There really was no sense in trying to get around him.

  She heaved a sigh. “Well, it’s like this. They got to arguing over who could buy me a drink . . .”

  This was a day in the life for Glory, for the most part. Men arguing over who got to do something for her.

  “. . . and for starters, I’m the bar-back tonight. I can’t drink with them when I’m working, even if I wanted to.”

  “You’re working here? You’re working here?”

  He shouldn’t have betrayed any emotion at all.

  Her chin went up. She met his eyes coolly. “Have to make a living somehow.”

  He only realized he was frowning when her gaze slid away from his.

  An unworthy cinder of hope flared hot in him: Had she stayed because of him?

  It was both the best thing and the worst thing he could hope for.

  “Thought you were leaving town for good, Glory,” he said shortly.

  “Thought you were here at the Plugged Nickel on business, Eli,” she countered tersely. “And what I do or don’t do is none of your business.”

  It would have felt like a slap. But he knew her. And he heard the hurt threaded through the anger.

  A silent stalemate ensued. Silent, that was, except for the staticky sound of “Iron Man” attempting to battle its way out of a fried speaker.

  “Okay,” he said evenly. “Did you tell those gentlemen you couldn’t drink with them when you were on duty?”

  “Mmm . . . Not in so many words. But I . . . well, I might have asked them to make their case in two sentences or less.”

  “Why did you . . . You made them answer essay questions?”

  God help him, of all the things he ought to be feeling right now, he thought this was pretty damn funny. A bored Glory Greenleaf was a dangerous Glory Greenleaf.

  “I didn’t make them do anything,” she pointed out quite reasonably, with a queenly little gesture of her hand. “Things were a little dull in here, and . . .” She shrugged with one shoulder. “I guess I got curious about what they’d say.”

  He hesitated. “What did they say?” Now he was curious.

  “Turns out Boomer is a Capricorn who just read a good book about the Lord he wants to tell me about, and he got a cat named Daphne to look out for the gophers in his garden. Dale is excited about his succulents and he likes to tinker with vintage automobiles, I guess when he’s not stealing them, and he says he’ll take me for a ride in one on the back roads because he knows some great views. Ramon’s uncle just kicked and left him a little money he wants to spend on me after he puts a new roof on his house.”

  He took this in, bemused. In truth, these little tidbits about guys he’d known for most of his professional life, usually on the adversarial end of it, were kind of touching. But then people had always seemed to want to tell Glory things. They laid them down trustingly, like little offerings, at her feet.

  But only people who had the patience or nerve to let their vision adjust to the sparks she threw off caught glimpses of how bone-deep kind she was.

  He realized he was smiling. All of it was so her and just hearing it made the world feel righter.

  She dropped her eyes. Funny, even though the lighting in that bar was hardly optimal, he could have sworn she was blushing.

  A beat of silence went by.

  “What about Leather Vest?”

  Her head shot up. “Oh, you mean Cheekbones?” she said breezily, and just like that, Eli’s spine stiffened against a shocking rogue wave of black jealousy. “He’s God’s gift, and he told me in all seriousness that I should know from just looking at him that he’s the best thing that will ever happen to me and he can show me fifty ways to have a good time, wink, wink. I guess he thought bravado would make him stand out a little from the crowd. The knife scar kind of highlights his bone structure, wouldn’t you say?”

  She met his eyes.

  Challenging. Curious.

  Glory being Glory.

  “No,” he said, slowly, to let her know he knew exactly why she’d said it. “That’s not how I’d put it.”

  She held his gaze a moment longer, then turned away and rubbed a rag on the bar, which didn’t need cleaning. The surface glowed her reflection back at her. That caressing motion made Eli restless.

  “So . . . I guess it got a little out of hand there for a while,” Glory conceded finally, ruefully.

  If Glory had a coat of arms, it would say, “It Got a Little out of Hand There for a While.” And right above that it would read, “I Got Curious.”

  In the middle would be an image of her holding a guitar over her head like Joan of Arc carrying her battle standard to war. Because Eli was certain that if the world could hear her sing and play, it would be hers to command.

  “So what happened after the guys answered your essay questions?”

  “I told them they all sounded so fascinating, I didn’t know how a girl could choose, and if they were feeling competitive maybe they ought to play a game together. At least now they have an occupation and their hands are full of cards so they aren’t arguing.”

  She sounded like a pre-school teacher who’d just passed out paste and construction paper to unruly toddlers.

  “Glory . . . I’m pretty sure they still believe you’re going to be the prize. Whether or not that was your intent.”

  She went still.

  “Really?”

  He almost rolled his eyes. He believed her. She might not be “his business,” but that didn’t mean he didn’t still know her really, really well.

  “Glory, do you remember when you were in the chemistry lab in high school, and you added the wrong chemical to the experiment, and it foamed all over and you had to stay after to clean it up and it took all night?”

  A swift succession of emotions flashed over her face: surprise, wicked amusement, something like yearning. Maybe pain. She was realizing, maybe, that he had all the same memories she did, from different angles.

  “I remember. It’s actually called elephant toothpaste. I added the right chemical . . . if you want it to foam.” Her mouth tipped up at the corner.

  “Yeah, well, I think Leather Vest is like that little extra chemical in that mundane mix. Except I think he can blow up the lab. Don’t play with that guy.”

  Damn. He shouldn’t have issued it as an order.

  She froze. Her face went dark. “You sure love to lay down the law, don’t you, Eli? But you don’t get a say in who I play with.”

  She shoved away from the bar as if she were pushing him bodily away and, with a flick of her hair over her shoulder, headed toward the back of the bar without another word.

  “Dammit, Glory—”

  Heads turned at his raised voice.

  Glory was as good at exits as she was at entrances. The eyes of all those men followed the swish of her hips and the sway of her hair until she was gone.

  Hell.

  He knew how they felt.

  And worse—or better—than that, he knew how she felt. He knew the weight of her whole self from the time he’d grabbed her by the belt loops just in time to keep her from skipping out into oncoming traffic when he was nine and she was seven.

  Or from when he was eighteen and she was sixteen, the weight of her arm, which she’d slid to wrap around him when she’d found him outside alone on the day of his father’s funeral, leaning against the back porch railing. His hand a visor over his eyes, as if he could hide the world from him and himself from the world. She’d tipped her head against his shoulder; there was no way she couldn’t feel him shaking. She didn’t say a word, though. He was everybody’s rock, hers included—his mother’s, his sister’s. Everyone knew football heroes didn�
��t cry.

  She’d stayed with him until he could draw a steady breath again. And then she’d gone back into the house without a word.

  In truth, her weight was no more a burden to him than wings were a burden to a bird.

  His instinct right now was to lunge after her and pull her back by the belt loops again.

  But she was right: he didn’t have the right to do it. It would have been more of a capture than a rescue. An attempt to hold on to something that was doing its damnedest to pull away.

  For a disorienting moment he felt utterly blank. As if the very laws of physics had changed.

  And then he got a grip. Because she was right about another thing: he did love laws. He loved their structure and certainty and they were his refuge when life got a little too painful or messy or ambiguous.

  And for God’s sake, he had his pride. A lot of it. Well-earned.

  That’s what got him moving again. So he nodded to Carl, and Carl nodded back, and then Eli nodded once more to the poker players and accompanied it with a meaningful glare to drive his point home, and he went back out the way he came and got in his cruiser. He radioed his location to Deputy Owen Haggerty and told him everything was fine at the Plugged Nickel, which felt like such a lie.

  Then he pressed his head back against his car seat.

  Citizens were in a law-abiding mood tonight. The radio stayed quiet. His thoughts sure weren’t. His stomach seemed to have tied itself into a cat’s paw knot, one of the more complicated knots he and Jonah had learned in Boy Scouts. Jonah could get out of those. There was no getting out of handcuffs or a jail cell, though.

  He sighed.

  Fuck.

  Eli looked out over the inky dark of the hills. The Plugged Nickel was roughly situated between Whiskey Creek and Coyote Creek. One was for pissing in, the other for swimming in, his dad had once said. Though he and Jonah had done both in both, grossing Glory out thoroughly.

  It was so dark you’d have to stare for a long time to even make out the shapes of individual trees, though the hillside was carpeted with them. Imagining a life without Glory in it was a bit like that. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t make out its outlines.

  He breathed in again and swiped his hands down his face.

  He’d decided to start his cruiser and back out, drive up Main Street, check on the storefronts, the usual.

  Which was why he was faintly surprised to find himself flinging the door open and crunching off over the dirt and gravel into the dark, toward the back of the Plugged Nickel, compelled by instinct and by a natural law that superseded all his logic and will and training. It was the same compulsion, he guessed, that had driven him to carve a set of initials on the Eternity Oak the day after his seventeenth birthday.

  He wasn’t much for superstition, but that was another moment where the need to do something had outweighed sense. And what he’d done then, if you believed local legend, was seal his fate.

  Chapter 2

  Glory stormed the length of the Plugged Nickel’s dank rear hall until she got to the back door, which she shoved open as if it existed merely to spite her. She stepped out into the bracing slap of the night and let the door swing shut hard behind her.

  That little bite in the air hadn’t been there a week ago; summer was beginning to surrender to fall.

  The nerve of time for moving forward when she was stuck here in Hellcat Canyon.

  She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes and sighed and banged her head lightly against the wall. Once, twice. Her heart was going like a kick drum. Damn damn. Damn damn. Damn damn. Like that.

  Just standing near Eli made her feel like a wire ran from her head to her toes and lit her up until she buzzed and crackled like the old neon sign out in front of the Plugged Nickel. The one that was bound to one day set the whole countryside on fire unless cheap-ass Carl sprang for a new one.

  The ironies were many, and they were all a little hard to take.

  For instance, wasn’t it funny how a kiss a lifetime in the making could ruin her in moments?

  And how every kiss from now on would be a footnote to that one?

  Not to mention every man?

  It was just her shitty luck that she hated him now.

  Growing up, Eli had been . . . like the weather. Part of the texture of all of her days, one of the essential little currents that fed every part of her life, the way Coyote Creek nourished all the flora and fauna around here. But there was the Eli she’d grown up with, who would never do a thing to hurt her.

  And then there was the Eli whose face was the deadly intent blank of a stranger’s as he moved toward Jonah that day in the Plugged Nickel and . . .

  She sucked in a sharp breath. Thinking about that day was like driving that narrow mountain road on I-5 up into Oregon at night in the pouring rain. You looked straight ahead, not down, not off into that infinite blackness, because you didn’t know what it contained and you were better off not knowing.

  So she didn’t think about that day.

  Or about Jonah.

  And she hadn’t talked to Eli since. She’d cut him right out.

  Life as she’d known it had shattered so hard she could see its innards, see all the little pieces that could never be put together in the same way again. And that meant all of her best laid plans had been kind of blown to bits, too.

  She’d suddenly needed a job again, stat. But she’d had to wheedle Carl into giving her this one, crappy as it was, given that she’d inadvertently singed a few bridges on what she’d thought would be her triumphant exit from town.

  Here she was again, employee of the year, outside marinating in angst. She really wasn’t proud of that. Pride itself was kind of a luxury, given her current circumstances, but she had a lot more of that than she did money, and it was the reason she wouldn’t tell Eli why she was working here.

  She wouldn’t have been able to bear his pity.

  Eli, who had always been her biggest champion. “Your happiness just contributes to the world’s happiness, Glory,” was how he’d put it once. “You have go for it.”

  She wondered if he was sorry he’d felt her up under that ponderosa pine now, and even now her body hummed, remembering.

  She’d been about fourteen years old when she discovered suspended fourths and back-strums, magical ways to make a guitar chord sound huge and ethereal. She put them to use right away on a song it seemed she’d been holding inside for ages. She sang it to herself now, softly.

  Oh, insecurity

  Obsessed with sex

  Obsessed with purity

  Not the most compatible blend

  Wide awake and wondering

  In what way I’m blundering

  For I sense that I am blundering again

  Then a thought emerges, pulls your name

  Like a banner through my head

  I am comforted

  You are my featherbed

  It was a little literal, a little wry, a little melodramatic, wholly heartfelt. She’d called the song “Featherbed.”

  She might as well have called it “Eli.”

  She stopped singing. Music was like heat on an ache. Or a nice little hit of opium. Writing it, playing it, listening to it meant a few minutes of surcease these days. But once the song was over the truth settled right back in and hurt again, and she supposed—here was yet another irony—the point of hurting was so music could come into being in the first place.

  “That’s a pretty song.”

  She gave a start.

  Oh hell. It was Leather Vest. Who had clearly followed her out the door. And apparently he’d all but tiptoed over here while she’d been singing.

  That didn’t bode well.

  “Got a light?” he tried next. When she just stared. He brandished a cigarette.

  She’d only called him Cheekbones to make Eli jealous. It had worked, that much was very clear, but there hadn’t been much satisfaction in that. Leather Vest was definitely good-looking, but then, a lot of
venomous snakes were pretty, too. Growing up in the country meant she could tell the venomous ones from the benign ones. He was the former.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  He’d planted himself with what felt like strategy between her and the back door of the Plugged Nickel. In front of them a few dozen yards away was an expanse of forest and Whiskey Creek, and over the hill from that was where she’d grown up, right now looking black and woolly with trees. Houses and cabins were tucked in there, but not a single light was on. It was going on two a.m. After all, even in the Whiskey Creek settlement, people had to sleep—or pass out—sometime.

  Leather Vest put his cigarette away. “I had four queens.”

  “You telling me about your poker hand or what you did last weekend?”

  It was a risky joke. But that was the mood she was in.

  It took him a second to get it.

  “Funny.” He didn’t sound amused. “I won tonight’s poker game with that hand. Hey, you must be a little chilly . . .” The long thorough look he gave her settled on her skin like grease. “. . . in that top.”

  Fuck. It seemed Eli had been right about old Leather Vest.

  Her top was white, had tiny frilly sleeves, laced up the front, fit like a glove, and showed just a little bit of tan midriff when she stretched up for things on high shelves. She did fill it out really well, if she did say so herself. She would be damned if this guy would make her feel cheap for that.

  He moved in closer still. His slightly unwashed scent, sweat layered with beer and smoke, literally raised her hackles. He smelled like bad danger, not the interesting kind.

  “Yeah. Too bad I didn’t wear my leather vest over it.” Her impulse was to do a quick dodge and feint and then dash around the other side of the building. But she was beginning to think this guy might actually enjoy a chase.

  She was quick and she knew a lot about breaking types of holds and stomping on insteps and gouging eyes and where to hit a guy to get him to buckle over, moaning. That was all thanks to Jonah and Eli, who had taught her all of that back when they could still all wrestle like puppies.