by Alison Kent
“What’re you talking about?” the other man demanded, advancing. He snagged his saw from the ground before Casper thought to grab it, brandishing it as he said, “Faith has a good-paying job. I have you for a partner. Seems pretty obvious to me.”
“Not that money.” Casper crossed to pick up his pruners. “The other money. The big money.”
Boone tugged down his hat until his eyes were slits of big bad brother lost in the shadow of the brim. “You know about her money?”
“I know she has it. I want to know where she got it.”
“How do you know she has it?” Boone asked a long moment later, his voice low and measured.
Casper thought fast. “Something she said one day. At the bank, I guess. When I wanted cash to put into the house.”
“Bullshit. Faith doesn’t talk about her money,” Boone said, raising his fist and aiming the sharp teeth of the saw at Casper. “And you don’t be talking about it either. Not to anyone. Including Dax.”
Fucking hell. What had Faith gotten herself into? “Do you see Dax? I’m just talking to you.”
“Well, don’t. It’s Faith’s deal. If she mentioned it,” Boone said, taking hold of another tree and bending it to his will, “and I’m more inclined to believe you happened to be in her office and eavesdropped, then ask her. Just don’t expect an answer.”
Like sister, like brother on that score. “You have a falling out with a favorite uncle or something? He cut you out of the will?”
Up came the saw again. “What the fuck did I just say to you? I’m not telling you anything about the money. It’s none of my business. And it’s sure as hell none of yours.”
“Fine. Jesus.” Casper took an exaggerated step in retreat, earning a roll of Boone’s eyes as he got back to the tiny cedars.
It was pretty apparent that Faith’s money was a sore spot, making it doubtful she would’ve said anything to her family about spending it on him. Hard to think Boone would be happy to learn that was the case, meaning Casper needed to be more careful about opening his big mouth.
He’d suss out the truth soon enough. He’d just have to find another way to get beyond that particular wall Faith had erected. Shouldn’t be hard. He was learning his way around her defenses. A few more nights together, he’d get there.
And it wasn’t like doing so would be a chore. In fact, he could see himself taking his time, making sure she enjoyed his run at the truth as much as he would.
By the time he’d settled all that in his mind and looked up, he was a good half-mile from the truck. Crap. He was going to have to make the same trip back, gathering up the tree trash as he went. No way in hell was Boone in the mood to give him a hand, much less a ride.
And then he dropped the bundle he was carrying, listening as the other man gunned the engine and drove the flatbed away, leaving him with a hell of a mess to clean up on his own, and then a hell of a long walk home.
TWENTY-FIVE
“WHAT THE HELL did you say to Clay?”
“When?” Faith asked in response, rather than wasting her time on any sort of cordial greeting. Manners were lost on the man.
Seeing him at her door when she’d looked through the peephole had surprised her. She’d already decided it would fall to her to break the silence between them, but she was not going to do it over the phone. And yet going to see him yesterday had only made things worse, or it had once she’d discovered his runaway was also a shoplifter, and that Casper, though not in denial over the crime, had tried to justify it as a matter of survival.
Right. A nearly ten-dollar paperback. The difference between life and death.
Yesterday was the first time in over a week they’d been face-to-face. She’d told him what she’d learned about the house coming into his father’s possession. He’d told her he knew Clay was a thief. That was it. They hadn’t talked about what she’d found in his bedroom on Mulberry Street. They hadn’t talked about much of anything since he’d discovered her there.
Nothing about the words and the sketches and the fire he’d set to get rid of them. And now here he was, as if that afternoon had only happened in her mind. As if their relationship hadn’t screeched to a halt when he’d walked out and left her to deal with his efforts to annihilate his past.
She thought now about inviting him in, but since he couldn’t be civil, she stopped thinking about it. Let him fight the moths and mosquitoes circling her porch light. Served him right, coming to her front door and jumping down her throat.
“The other night.” He pulled off his hat, waved it into the insect cloud, smacked his hand to his neck when he was dive-bombed in retaliation. “When I had to leave to go to Summerlin’s and asked you to feed Clay and get him home.”
She hedged. “I don’t know. We talked about the menu at the Blackbird Diner.”
“Wait.” Casper shook his head as if dislodging something peskier than a bug. “You took him to the diner? In public?”
“You told me to feed him,” she said. If he’d been nicer she might’ve apologized, shared her concerns that she’d made a mistake.
“Jesus, Faith. I didn’t tell you to take him out and expose him to the Crow Hill gossip mill.”
“Sorry.” She crossed her arms, bare in her summer work wardrobe of a sleeveless white blouse. “I’m not used to subterfuge. Besides. He knew Teri. You’ve obviously taken him by there.”
“Only to pick up food. Not to put him on display.” He batted at another swarm. “Would it be too much trouble to let me in? Before I get eaten alive?”
She opened the door wider, shut it behind him, tried not to breathe deeply until he was downwind. Her body’s response to him did not belong in this conversation. “I didn’t put him on display. I fed him like you asked. And then I took him by Kendall’s to pay for the book he stole.”
“Jesus Christ.” He tossed his hat to her coffee table, collapsed onto her sofa, scrubbed his hands down his face. “Jesus H. Christ.”
His weariness got to her. He was fighting so much. The ranch and his lack of money. The house and his attached past. The boy and the approach of Clay’s legal battles. And then it hit her. Clay hadn’t told him that she’d taken him by Kendall’s bookstore.
That while he’d gone inside, she’d waited at the front window, watching him shuffle to the counter to pay, his head down. That she’d mouthed a silent thank you to her friend for letting the boy off once he’d apologized and made restitution.
She returned to the kitchen and her abandoned pizza, got both of them a beer and handed his to him without a single glance at his jeans or his thighs. “He told me you wouldn’t like it if I called the cops.”
“I wouldn’t have.”
But he said nothing about it being the right thing to do. “You were just going to let him get away with it?”
“No, but I would’ve handled it.”
She didn’t say anything to that. She just waited for him to realize he hadn’t handled anything yet. “So…”
He drank from his longneck, his gaze holding hers. “Thank you. I’m not so good with handling things.”
“You’re going to have to get good with it if you’re planning on keeping him around.”
He leaned his head to the side, cracked his neck, did the same on the other. “Yeah. I know. I’ll figure it out.”
“Do it now, Casper. School’s already started. He’s already a grade behind.”
“Shit. I figured he was, but…He tell you that?”
She nodded.
“What else did he tell you?” he asked, his words a plea, not an accusation. He cared. He wanted to know. Seemed almost desperate to know.
She hitched up onto a barstool. “That his mother used drugs. A lot. That she most likely died of an overdose, but he doesn’t know for sure. Social services came to his trailer one morning and took him away. That was it. He didn’t get much in the way of answers.”
“Jesus.” He looked down at the longneck he’d propped on his belt buckle. “He told
me she was a good mom.”
“I guess the one doesn’t preclude the other.”
“It does in my book,” he said, and drank.
“Did your mother use drugs?”
“My mother was a booze hound, which isn’t much different.”
“He said his mother brought home a lot of cowboys.” When he didn’t respond, she asked, “Do you think she took money from men? For sex?”
“She didn’t take it from me,” he said, and drank again.
“His mother reminds you of your mother, doesn’t she?”
“Hardly.”
“She came to you for sex. And left her six-year-old son alone at home.”
“She came to me for sex. But she brought me home with her,” he said, still drinking.
“With her six-year-old son nearby.”
“At least she was there.”
Until she wasn’t. “Talk to him.”
“What?”
“Talk to him. Don’t give him chores and tell him how to do them. Talk to him. Help him. Fix this for him.” The boy had unloaded, not the least bit reluctant to stop the flow of words, as if he’d needed someone to talk to, someone to ask him about his life. Someone to care what he’d been through. Someone to want to make a difference.
And he was looking to Casper to be that man.
“I don’t want to talk about this, okay? I’m doing what I can. That’s what matters. Clay’s in trouble and he doesn’t have anyone he trusts to turn to.”
Just like Casper had never had anyone.
But to help him, to help them both, she needed to know Casper’s side, to hear him admit it. “Why is it so important to you to be there for this boy?”
“You’re asking me that? Seriously?” He gestured expansively, his expression incredulous, the bottle in his hand. “After what you saw in that house?”
But she continued to push. “You just told me his mother wasn’t like your mother.”
“They were both whores, okay? My mother just made a living at it, while Angie…Angie was just lonely.”
“Were you?”
“A whore?”
She was not going to tease him about this. “Were you lonely?”
“Sometimes. Not with women like Angie around. But sometimes.”
She didn’t believe him. “Clay said he didn’t know who his father was.”
He shook his head, sat forward, draped his wrists over his knees. “You two covered just about everything, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t torture anything out of him, Casper. He talked. I listened.” She thought back to Clay deciding it was time to pay the piper. “He’s got it in him to be okay. Whatever happens.”
“I’m not going to let whatever”—another gesture, his arm flinging to the side—“happen. Goddammit, Faith. I may not have grown up surrounded by family, but I know letting things happen is not how it’s done.”
“I just meant—”
“You just meant that I need to prepare for the worst. Prepare him for the worst.”
She waited, let that settle, then asked again, “Why is being there for him so important?”
“Because no one was there for me!” He surged to his feet, kicking at her coffee table when his boot snagged it, disappearing into the kitchen with the longneck he’d polished off. She expected to hear him jerk open the fridge for another, but it was silence that reached her instead.
She gave him a couple of minutes, then she followed, her bare feet soundless as they sunk into her plush carpeting. The kitchen was dark, the light from the eating nook catching him in profile where he stood with his hands on the sink. It lit his cheek and his neck and his elbow and forearm beneath his dark T-shirt’s sleeve.
He looked exhausted, beaten, weary in ways no amount of sleep or bill-paying money or ground-soaking rain would soothe. It cut her to the quick, that sense of defeat, as if he couldn’t face one more brick wall, one more dead end.
She came up behind him, got a raised hand and a sharp, “Don’t,” before she got close enough to touch him. “Just…don’t.”
Fine. She made a fist, bit her tongue, turned, and left the room. He could do his man-against-the-world thing and let himself out. She was going to bed.
And she did. At least she flounced into the middle of it, fully dressed, lying back and staring at the ceiling fan, fighting with herself to stay there, not to hop up and run back and tell him all the ways she could make things better for him. That doing so would make things better for her.
Her arms stretched out across the mattress, she dug her fingers into her comforter. She had to stop trying to fix him. He’d shown her the worst of his cracks, trusting her not to twist his vulnerability, or use it against him…yet she couldn’t bring herself to share hers.
God, she was such a hypocrite. She was the one who was really broken, who could not get beyond the mistakes she’d made in the past, who was still fighting against her adventurous nature jailed inside pantyhose and black pumps.
Wiping at the corners of her eyes, she took a deep breath, hearing Casper coming to her before she blew it out. He stopped in her doorway, leaned a shoulder against the jamb, crossed his arms and ankles, as if he had to get everything settled just right before he could speak.
She took that time to sit up, tucking her legs to the side since her skirt was too tight for anything else. And then she waited because that’s how this worked. Casper weighed the truth of what he carried, coming to her only when he’d stored the part of the burden he couldn’t share safely out of sight.
“I didn’t mean it. Telling you not to touch me.”
He’d bit off the word don’t. He’d said it twice. Sounded to her like he’d meant it, but she kept that to herself and continued to wait. She couldn’t rush him. She’d pushed him enough for one night, even if keeping her mouth shut was killing her.
After a moment, he dropped his shields and walked into her room. He settled onto the bed beside her, reached up and brushed her hair from her face, looking at her, but not into her eyes. At her ear, her neck, her shoulder. “Why in the hell do you put up with me?”
“A question I am constantly asking myself,” she said, leaning into his touch.
“After everything you’ve seen—”
“Shh.” She brought her fingers to his lips. “Where you came from, what you’ve been through, that’s all in the past.”
“Except for who it turned me into. That’s all in the present.”
“I’m in the present, too. You seem to keep forgetting that.”
“I’ve been an ass, shutting you out this last week. It’s just been so much, all of it. Working at Summerlin’s, the house, Clay…”
“And the ranch.”
“I don’t even count the ranch anymore. It’s like the monster that will not die. Sometimes I think it would be easier if it would.”
But it wouldn’t. And they both knew that. “The zombie ranch, eating your brain.”
“If I had a brain, I would never have let this thing with Clay get to this point. I would’ve handled it as soon as I realized who he was and where he’d come from. I need to get it done.”
She took a deep breath, a hopeful breath, the flutter of wings in her chest hopeful, too. “Then we’ll go. Talk to whoever we need to talk to.”
“I’ll go. This isn’t your fight.”
“No, but you don’t have to fight on your own.”
TWENTY-SIX
“I WANTED TO APOLOGIZE again about Clay. About the other night. I shouldn’t have taken him to the diner. Or talked to him without first talking to you.”
Hunkered down at the rear of Remedy’s stall, hunting for his missing catch rope, Casper couldn’t help but grin as he listened to Faith ramble on. He had a really hard time believing she’d come all the way out here for that. More like she’d come out here because they hadn’t seen each other for three days now and she couldn’t wait any longer.
He’d been planning to head to her place tonight after he finished up at Su
mmerlin’s because he couldn’t wait any longer either. Besides, they’d settled things about Clay on Tuesday before getting naked and losing hours of sleep. “You could’ve called.”
“I did call,” she said, pulling open the stall door and stepping inside. She had on blue heels to go with her blue skirt, and her blouse had little things fluttering over her shoulders he guessed were supposed to be sleeves. “First your cell, which I learned has been disconnected. Then the house phone where I left a message. I even called Boone, though since he doesn’t keep his phone with him, I don’t know why. I guess I could’ve tried Dax, but I already felt like a nag.”
He got to his feet, the catch rope in his hand. “You’re not a nag, and you don’t need to apologize. You did what you thought was right, talking to him. You did what I should’ve done and didn’t. If anything, I’m the one who owes you.”
“Depends on what it is you think you owe. But speaking of owing,” she said before he could detail the things he had on his mind. She held out a business-sized envelope. “The reason I’m here. I’ve got a bill from John Massey covering the first stage of the demolition and build-out.”
“Figured you would’ve written a check and shown me the damage afterward,” he said, looking from the rope he held to the way her blouse pulled tight over her tits.
“You don’t have much faith in me as a business partner, do you? Besides, their terms are thirty days net, and I can earn enough interest in that time to put a big dent in the whole of the construction cost. I just wanted to make sure you saw it—”
Again. He didn’t believe that for a minute.
“—and to find out if you’ve made an appointment with Greg.”
Now that he believed. “Not yet. I’ll be getting a check tonight from Summerlin, so I’ll call him Monday first thing.”
“Use the phone in the tack room and call him now.”
“I’m pretty sure you just said something about not being a nag.”
“You didn’t need to wait to get a check. I would’ve loaned, not given, loaned you the money.”
