by Susan Sey
“Anything you want, Willa.” He lifted his other hand from the stone and smoothed a wet spike of hair away from her pale cheek. Her lashes were dark crescents against her luminous skin, and he traced a knuckle down the edge of that pixie-pointed jaw. He drew his palm down the line of her spine next, past the rumpled mass of her skirt to the living heat of her thigh. He hissed out a breath but his hands were gentle, reverent. Because he knew he was telling her the naked truth. He’d already given her his own ugly history. He’d given her his pain, his sorrow, his shame. He’d given her his vulnerability when he’d asked her to stay. When he’d begged her not to run from him, from whatever this was that lived and pulsed between them.
He’d give her his body, too, if that was what she wanted.
He’d give her anything.
Willa pressed her cheek to the familiar warmth of her rock, twined her fingers through Eli’s on her breast and shook. She wasn’t cold, though, not anymore. For the first time in years, Willa felt clean. Clean and hollow and new. She’d emptied herself with the sky, poured all the secrets and pain, the loneliness and rage out onto this ancient, hallowed ground. And the whole time, Eli had held her. He’d held her through the storm that raged within, letting the storm outside beat its fists on his back while hers stayed warm and dry.
So, no, Willa wasn’t cold. How could she be with Eli so hot and hard against her, his desire so pure and uncomplicated that it burned away all her stains?
“Anything you want, Willa,” he murmured again. “I’ll give it to you.”
“You,” she said, and she’d never known any higher truth. “I want you.”
“Are you sure?”
She pressed her bottom into the hot ridge of his erection. “Try me.”
He slid his hand out from under hers, moved it to the back to her thigh and Willa went still, lust sparking in her nipples, pooling hot in her center. He slid one finger under the elastic of her panties and nudged, his touch a gentle question against her most private place. She lifted and offered herself, met him with slick welcome. Eli hissed out a breath through his teeth, and sank that finger deep.
She arched and cried out.
He released a shaky breath. “Okay, so we’re doing this.”
“Only if you want to live.”
He gave a soft chuckle and withdrew slowly. She spread both hands flat on the rock and whimpered but then he added a second finger and slid deep again. Her core quivered and her nipples tightened to aching buds of need. She didn’t open her eyes — didn’t know if she could — but she twisted sideways to offer them to him. She felt his gaze, hot as a touch, on those stiff, needy points pressing greedily against the wet fabric of her dress. “Jesus, Willa, you’re so pretty.” He cupped her breast with his free hand, plumped it in his palm and rolled the tip between his fingers. Even through layers of material, the sensation shot from her breast to her core. Her world skidded sideways, and she pushed back into the fingers of his other hand, still stroking deep inside her. But it wasn’t enough. She circled and sought, hungry, needful, desperate. It wasn’t enough.
“Please,” she murmured, her mind a helpless sheet of desire. “Eli, please.”
“Okay, I know. Just let me—” He urged her upright, found the zipper of her dress and drew it down. She raised her arms, allowed him to lift it away. It landed with a wet slap somewhere in the pine needles, followed by her bra. The night air flowed over her damp skin, steamy and lush, and Eli took her hand, pressed it to her own breast. He used her own fingers to pinch the nipple gently and his lips landed on the tender curve of her neck, hot and open.
“You take over here,” he murmured and Willa obeyed without thought, rolling her nipple between her own fingers while sparks exploded behind her closed lids and shimmered through her body. “I’m going to be busy for a while.”
He hooked his fingers into the sides of her panties — pretty pink things, thanks to Georgie — and slid them reverently down. He lifted one of her knees then the other, slipping the panties free of each foot with a care that put a funny clutch in her chest. There was another wet plop as they joined her dress somewhere in the woods, followed by Eli’s t-shirt. Then there was the shush of his zipper. Foil ripped — protecting her again — and Willa’s skin tightened deliciously.
Then his hands were on her hips, his lips on her shoulder and she bent once again to lay herself on the altar of her thinnie. She turned her face to the side, one cheek against the rock’s rough heat, the other exposed to the swirling night air, wet and warm as a kiss. He nudged her knees farther apart, put himself between them and she hissed in an electric breath. The tip of his erection found her, plump and swollen and needy, and she moaned. Heat streaked down her legs, exploded in her mind, flooded that aching place between her legs that needed him. She pinched her nipple and felt her core quiver for him in welcome, in demand.
“Oh Christ,” he said, and plunged deep. Satisfaction sang through her as he filled her, as he found all her empty, aching places and put himself there. Hunger roared in after it. It wasn’t enough. She wanted more. She needed more.
“Eli,” she gasped. “I need—”
“I know.” His hands flexed on her hips. She could feel him shaking against the backs of her thighs. Or was that her? She didn’t know. She was falling apart, disintegrating, sifting away like sand. He withdrew by slow, aching inches and her womb spasmed, clutched at him. He swore and sank deep again. And again. And again. Until there was nothing but him, nothing but the scent of his desire, so clean and pure, swirling in the steamy air rising from the earth all around them. Nothing but his skin against hers as he pushed himself into every empty corner, every lonely forgotten place. And when she was full, when he’d filled her, she clenched around him and exploded in a star-bright fury.
CHAPTER 25
THEY DRESSED IN fragile silence, as if there were a newborn between them they didn’t want to wake. Eli had the oddest sense that there was. Something new and tender and exquisitely valuable had been born between them just now, something they should protect for the rest of their lives if it didn’t fly away like an exotic bird.
She turned, swept her hair away from her back and presented him with her zipper. He found the tab and pulled it up slowly, reluctant to hide the delicate line of her spine. He pressed his mouth to the tender curve where her neck met her shoulder and she touched his cheek. Once upon a time, Eli might’ve felt the need to say something. Tonight he swam through the silence like a fish through water. There would be words soon enough. Ugly ones. Awful ones. Necessary ones. Right now, all Eli needed was her hand in his, and the gift of her smile.
She gave him both and they walked the night path home.
The little cabin glowed in the moon-dappled woods, and Eli glanced with surprise at his watch. A lifetime must’ve passed since that brutal scene back at the gallery but it wasn’t even eleven p.m. yet. And Willa’s truck wasn’t alone in the drive. There was a shiny Range Rover, too, plus a sleek black beemer and an ancient Ford F350 that somebody had jacked out into a mini-pumper.
The Davises had arrived.
“The reckoning is upon us,” Willa murmured beside him.
He tugged her hand and she stopped with him in the shadows at the edge of the woods. “It doesn’t have to be.” He met her eyes in the darkness, and they were like liquid silver. “We don’t have to go in there. You can come home with me.”
“I could.” She smiled at him. “But I’m not going to. I always knew this would happen someday.”
“But it doesn’t have to be today. Not if you aren’t ready.”
She took his other hand and tugged him down until he leaned his forehead against hers. “I’m ready.” The air between them was a private garden that twisted and swayed with the scent of rain and pine needles and her. “It’s time.” She hesitated. “Will you stay, though?” He opened his eyes and gazed down at her. Moonlight limned the angles and edges of her face in silver, and her hair was a wild fairy-tumble over her shoulders.
“I don’t want to be alone.”
He cupped her cheek in one hand, an aching wave of tenderness tightening his throat. “As long as you want me.”
She leaned into his palm, her lashes coming down over her eyes. “Thank you.”
Eli couldn’t help but notice as they started across the yard toward the cabin that she hadn’t said how long that might be. An hour? A day? A week? The rest of his life?
But just like before, he knew with unerring certainty that he’d give her whatever she asked of him.
Thirty minutes later, Willa was freshly showered and seated on her lumpy old couch between Eli and Addy. Jackson Davis sat on the arm of the couch next to Addy while Willa’s father brewed coffee in the kitchen with a quiet competence she didn’t remember from her childhood. Somebody had dragged the straight-backed kitchen chairs into the living room while she’d showered, and Bianca perched on the edge of one like it was a throne, her spine a regal six inches from the back, her hands folded loosely in her lap. Georgie sat beside her mother with that liquid grace of hers, somehow making her creaky old chair look as comfortable as a hammock. Matty sat on the rug between them, his back against the TV stand, elbows propped on knees, big hands dangling limply between them. He frowned into space, as if digesting this new upside-down view of the world Gerte had thrust upon him. Willa’s heart ached vaguely, as if the pain were trying to reach her from an immense distance. It was temporary, she knew. Like the aftermath of a traumatic trip to the dentist. The pain was coming. You only had to wait for it.
“Well,” Bianca said briskly. “That was quite a scene at the gallery earlier.”
“Gerte,” Georgie sneered.
“Bitch,” Matty muttered.
“Language,” Bianca said and flicked his ear, then turned it into a caress. “Not that I’ll argue with the sentiment.” She sighed. “But it was bound to happen.”
“What was bound to happen?” Matty asked dully. “I’d find out that you bought me from a fourteen-year-old?”
Willa experienced another buffeting gust of distant pain but nothing penetrated. Bianca smoothed a hand over Matty’s dark head and he closed his eyes, to Willa’s everlasting gratitude. She was temporarily immune to pain, not bullet-proof.
“I’ve spoken to Matty,” she informed Willa. “I explained everything, and in much more accurate and compassionate terms than Gerte was able to summon. But he wasn’t going to be satisfied until he heard it from you.” She released a determined breath. “Obviously, my credibility with him isn’t what it could be these days.” She gave Willa a tight, close-lipped smile. “So here we are.”
Willa studied her like she was a brand new entity, an unknown quantity she’d never tangled with before. She might as well be. There was an emptiness inside Willa now where all that hatred and resentment used to live, and it was so new, so vast. It was hard to adjust to the hugeness of it, the lightness. The absence. It was negative space, like a missing tooth or an amputated limb, and Willa was still trying to get her balance back.
The one thing she knew, however, was that she would get used to it. She’d been released from the prison of her secret, and she wasn’t going back, not ever. Not even for Matty. It was time to tell the truth.
“I’ll tell you everything,” Willa said. “Everything I know, though I don’t know all of it.”
Bianca’s dark eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, you don’t know all of it? What could you possibly not know?”
Georgie touched her mother’s clenched hands. “Mom. Let her talk.” She waved lazily at Willa. “Go on.”
“Before I start,” she said to Matty, sitting so still and silent between his mother and his sister, “you need to know something.” She waited until he lifted those gray eyes to hers, and the shock of recognition, of connection sang through her like a cracking whip. “I always loved you. I would’ve kept you if I could, if there was any way at all. But I was only a little older than you are now when you were born, and my choices were limited. By my age, by my circumstances.” She shrugged. “I was a Zinc, you know.”
She paused when Brett came into the living room, carrying a coffee pot and a handful of chipped mugs. She glanced at him, waited for the usual pinch of resentment but nothing came. She was still echoingly empty, but it was a clean, bright space with no room for an abandoned child’s anger. She reached out and took the mugs from him, set them in a neat row on the coffee table at her knees. He flashed her a look of tentative gratitude. She met it, accepted it. He blinked in surprise.
“I’ll get some milk and sugar,” he said slowly.
“No, Dad,” Willa said. “Stay. You need to hear this as much as anybody.”
“I’ll get it,” Addy said and rose. Jax rose as well but she said, “No, you stay, too. It’ll just take a second.”
Jax subsided onto the arm of the couch where he’d been perched beside his fiancée.
“I am a Zinc,” Willa continued while Addy bustled around in the kitchen, “and in this town that’s as loaded a name as Davis. Except where Davis means money and privilege and talent, Zinc means drunk and disorderly and possibly dangerous.”
Brett folded into an empty chair, his head bowed. “That was my fault, Willa. You shouldn’t have had to carry the weight of my mistakes.”
She shrugged. Should’ve was a wish without the birthday candles. She continued talking to Matty, only to him. “This story — our story — isn’t a nice one, Matisse. But if there’s one thing I want you to hear while I tell it, one thing I want you to believe? It’s that I wanted you. I never wanted anything more than you in my life. But you weren’t my baby. I didn’t give birth to you.”
Addy froze in the act of placing a little pitcher of milk on the table. Her eyes were round and green. “I couldn’t find any sugar,” she said blankly.
“Excuse me?” Bianca’s spine snapped even straighter if such a thing were possible, and her lips went white. “Of course you gave birth to him!”
“Screw the sugar,” Jax said and tugged Addy onto the couch beside him again, threaded his fingers through hers.
Eli’s hand crept up to rest against the small of Willa’s back, his palm warm and strong and reassuring. It gave her the courage to ignore the blistering power of Bianca’s fury and keep her focus on the boy they both loved. She spoke to him, only to him. He stared at her, those familiar eyes guarded, that beautiful face a careful blank.
“I was fourteen in the sketches we all saw tonight. Fourteen years old and dizzy in love with an amazing boy. A boy who looked just like you.”
“Except for my eyes,” Matty said slowly. “Nobody in our family has them. I always assumed I got them from my mother, but if you’re not her—”
“You did get them from your mother.” Willa tipped her head in acknowledgement. “I got mine from the same woman.”
Matty stared, uncomprehending, but Brett jerked as if she’d struck him. “Shay?”
“Oh dear God,” Addy said, her fingers going to her open mouth.
“You’re not my son, Matty,” Willa said gently. “You’re my brother.”
Jax said, “Holy shit,” and even Georgie snapped out of her slouch to blink owlishly. Bianca went unnaturally still, her mouth open while the scent of her horror, cold and jagged, leached into the air around her. It all but burned Willa’s nose but she still didn’t take her eyes off Matty. Bianca dropped a hand to the boy’s shoulder and he seized it with both hands like she’d thrown him a life preserver.
“Who’s Shay?” he asked, his voice shaking.
Eli’s thumb stroked her back, a silent infusion of courage and Willa went on.
“My mother’s name was Shay,” she told Matty. “She was beautiful and charming and selfish and vain, and when I was a little girl, I loved her. God, I worshipped her. I orbited her the way a planet circles the sun. She used to dress me up like a little doll and take me out to lunch or shopping. People would always stop us to say how pretty we were.”
“I remember that,” Brett murmured,
his eyes unseeing. “She’d do your hair just like hers, put on those matching blue dresses, and come by the bar for lunch just to show you off.”
“No, Dad.” Willa smiled faintly. “Not to show me off, but to show off, period. If there’s one thing a sociopath loves, it’s attention. And she loved all the attention she got from the guys who hung around the taproom, all your cop buddies from your days on the force.”
Brett flinched. Willa regretted causing him pain but his mistakes were his own to reconcile. She had her hands full with her own.
“But I got older and so did Shay.” Her shoulders had somehow found their way up to her ears. She stopped, pulled in a deep breath, let it out slowly. Consciously let go of the past, and let her shoulders melt back down. “I hit puberty while Shay was looking down the barrel of forty, and suddenly, I wasn’t so fun to take out in public. I developed early and kind of, ah, enthusiastically.” Matty’s cheeks went a dull red and he studied his knees carefully. “Men started to look at me with the interest they should’ve given her, and Shay couldn’t stand that. Never mind that I had no idea what to do with that kind of interest. At that point, I hardly even understood it existed. But sociopaths can’t really see things from any point of view but their own, and the only currency Shay understood or dealt in was sex. It was her trump card, and nobody else was allowed to play it. Particularly not her daughter.”
“Jesus,” Brett said wearily and dragged a hand down his face. “What kind of mother thinks about her own kid that way?”
“Look at me, Dad. This is her face, her body, even her hair. I wasn’t her kid. I was the competition.”
“And she hated you for that. She must have.”
“Hate was all she had,” Willa said. “Anyway, that was when she started…acting out.”
“Sexually, you mean,” Bianca said. She frowned first at Willa, then shifted that dark gaze to Brett. Willa frowned, too. Had she really caught the faintest whiff of sympathy? From Bianca?
