by Aly Martinez
In the distance, I heard River squeal, “Oh. My. God. Savannah! What are you doing here?”
I mentally groaned when Savannah’s response was as to be expected: “Penn’s my new daddy.”
After kicking the door shut, I carried Cora to the bed, gently set her down, and toed off my shoes before starting in after her. In my head, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. The two of us had built an entire relationship on nothing but lounging in bed together.
We hadn’t gone on dates to nice restaurants.
We hadn’t binged on TV.
We’d just lain together, talking, kissing, and spending time with each other.
That was who we were as a couple.
But we weren’t a couple anymore—no matter how much it slaughtered me.
Suddenly sitting up, she scrambled to the opposite edge. “No. I need some space.”
It burned like acid, but what did I expect? That she’d be so thrilled to see me again that she’d forget the fire, the money—hell, everything about the last few weeks—and welcome me home with her mouth and then maybe her body?
Fuck. After that kiss in the truck, that was exactly what I’d been hoping for.
Dumbass.
Nodding, I shifted directions and moved to the leather armchair in the corner, perching on the edge like the seat was filled with piranhas. “Are you okay?”
She lifted a finger in the air. “Let’s pause on the fact that you’re supposed to be dead for a minute and jump right to: Why do you have Savannah?”
“I made a promise.”
She laughed in a short burst. “I guess I’m glad that one wasn’t a lie.”
Shit. She’d been waffling back and forth between being sweet, diving into my arms, and being pissed. But I was really hoping her yo-yo of emotions would swing in my favor.
Again: Dumbass.
“Did Thomas—”
“You,” she interrupted, grabbing her necklace and dragging it back and forth across the chain. “I don’t want to talk about Thomas until I know what the hell is happening with you, Penn.” Tears dripped off her chin and she used her shoulder to dry them.
The muscles in my jaw tensed. She had every right to be pissed. Hell, she had the right to never speak to me again. But I wasn’t about to go down without a fight.
I sucked in a deep breath and put my elbows to my knees. It was now or never. And as I’d learned over the last few weeks, never wasn’t an option when it came to my feelings about Cora.
“We can’t talk about me without talking about Thomas. He killed my wife.”
Her head snapped to the side. “What?”
I cracked my neck. Those twenty-nine minutes had changed my life. I’d obsessed over them for the last few years, and it wasn’t until I’d met Cora that I’d been able to spend a single night without being trapped in that bloody hotel room.
I didn’t want her to know the man I’d become after I’d lost Lisa.
I’d felt like the old me when I had been with Cora—more than I had in years, if not ever. To me, those moments with her were like a last-minute pardon from death row. She was the first person to give me a reason to want to live again.
But if I was being honest with myself, the shallow and heartless man driven by hate and pain, the liar who had manipulated his way into her bed, was all she’d ever known of me.
And it ruined me that I had to tell her that.
But I owed it to her.
And so much more.
So, while staring into her deep-blue eyes, I finally gave her the truth.
“My name is Shane Pennington. Drew isn’t my brother. He’s actually my brother-in-law—Lisa’s twin—and we didn’t get the job at your building by chance.”
Her mouth fell open in pure astonishment. “Are you, like, an undercover cop?”
I leaned back in the chair, but only to keep myself from reaching out to her. “Far from it. Drew and I came here to find and kill the man responsible for Lisa’s death.”
She shook her head. “I…I don’t understand. You said the police shot the men who murdered her.”
“They did. But those men didn’t just break into her room and kill her in a robbery gone wrong the way the police tried to shove down my throat. They killed her for sport. I blew through private investigators, but we never could link the men who killed her to Manuel, Dante, or Marcos. So Drew and I put our heads together and decided to go straight to the source. Drew stole two cars to get locked away with Manuel.”
“Manuel? Why would he do that?”
“Because Lisa was nosing around in Guerrero business when she was killed.”
She slapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, God.”
Scrubbing my palms back and forth over my denim-covered thighs, I ached to hold her. But if I wanted to get through this, I had to tell her all of it.
“We lucked out when he and Manuel became fast friends and then cellmates, but even if Manuel had hated him, being on the inside gave us more intel than we could ever get on the outside.”
She shook her head, paused, and then shook it again. She looked like she was in a maze, mentally running into dead ends before backtracking and moving in a different direction. “Wait… So Manuel told you Thomas killed your wife?”
I groaned, dreading this part the most. “No. You told me that.”
Suddenly coming unstuck from the bed, she jumped to her feet. “I never said that!”
“Relax. Come here.” I extended an arm out to her, starving to pull her into my lap, but she sidestepped my attempt.
“Don’t touch me. Just talk.”
I grumbled, shifting in my seat. “We came here looking for Catalina. Manuel had told Drew that his granddaughter had sat in on a meeting where a man had asked him to order a hit on a nosy reporter. We just couldn’t figure out who that man was. Manuel only had one granddaughter, and he’d always believed you knew where her mother was. The night right before the fire, when you were telling me about Manuel and Thomas falling apart, all the pieces clicked into place.”
She rounded forward like I’d punched her in the stomach. “Oh, God. It was River, wasn’t it? She was the one who was there.”
I didn’t have to answer.
She started pacing. “Oh, God. This is bad. So so so bad. He’s going to find out River was the one who told you.”
“I won’t let anything happen to her. I promise. I’m going to kill him, Cora.”
“Oh, great,” she smarted. “That makes it all better. That worked out so well when you killed Marcos and Dante.” She waved a hand in my direction. “Shit, maybe that did work out after all.”
My lips twitched. Fuck, she was cute.
I forced my mouth flat when she stopped and looked at me, her eyes narrowed in bewilderment, not attitude.
“Wait. If you’re alive, whose body did Drew identify in the fire?”
“One of Marcos’s entourage. I called them. Taunted them about taking over the business. Told them that you and all the women were mine. They sent two men first, thinking I’d be dead before they had to put on their shoes. It didn’t work out that way. I lured them up the back stairs. Deleted the thirty seconds of footage of them following me into your apartment and then peeled the stars off your ceiling as I waited for Dante and Marcos to arrive.”
“There were only three bodies in the fire. What happened to the other guy?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters!”
I ground my teeth. “You pissed that I took out the trash with those two assholes? Trust me, Cora. We did our research. Those pricks were Marcos’s thugs for a reason. They got what was coming to them.”
“I don’t care that you killed them. If I had a pair of tap shoes right now, I’d do a fucking jig. I am, however, sick of being lied to and kept in the dark whenever you and Drew see fit. So either tell me the goddamn truth, Penn, or you can go back to playing the role of the dead man in this story.”
“Fine. I rolled the body out t
he fucking window before spending the night burying him in Marcos’s backyard.”
Her mouth opened and closed, but short of a few audible puffs of air, nothing came out. She stared at me for several seconds, her eyes alternated between flaring in surprise and narrowing in disbelief until finally she asked, “Who are you?”
It was the easiest question I’d get all night. “Whoever I need to be to keep you safe.” Unable to stop myself, I stood up and, in a few short strides, closed the distance between us.
She immediately backed away, colliding with the wall, and while I wanted to be man enough to give her the option of space, I couldn’t. Right then, I was drowning in a different way.
Careful not to touch her, I put my palms on the wall at either side of her head and dipped down until our mouths were mere inches apart. “I love you, Cora. And I don’t feel bad about any of it. I was your man. Taking care of you and your girls—that was my only fucking job.”
Her breathing shuddered, but her back straightened as she stared me right in the eye and spat, “You were never my man.”
Blood thundered in my ears as I loomed closer, my chest finding hers, her breasts pillowing between us. My voice was low and jagged as I rumbled, “That’s fucking bullshit and you know it.”
“I didn’t even know your name,” she seethed. “My man wouldn’t have lied to me every minute of every day. Nor would he have faked his own death, leaving me to sink in the pits of grief all over again. Especially not after I’d opened my heart, telling him everything I’d been through with Nic. You lost your fucking mind when I disappeared for a few hours because it reminded you of Lisa. And then you walk out of my life, flipping every last one of my buttons on your way out? No. No way.” She gave my chest a hard shove, catching me off guard and sending me back a step. “I’m not an expert in love, Penn, Shane, whatever the fuck your name is, but I can assure you that is not it.”
“I did that to protect you.”
“I didn’t need protection! I needed you!” She stomped around me. “I was going to school, Penn. I’m one semester away from getting my bachelor’s in accounting. I had cash. I had plans for a future. I was getting out of there. I didn’t need a man to rush in and rescue me. I needed a man to stand at my side and help me figure out a life outside of there. I needed a partner, not another fucking obstacle.”
I planted my hands on my hips and breathed, “An obstacle? Are you shitting me? I left you everything you could ever possibly need.”
Her face vibrated as she roared, “Everything but you!”
My patience cracked. She wasn’t the only one who’d been hurting.
“I couldn’t stay.” I raked a rough hand through the top of my hair. “Believe me, Cora. I tried to figure out a way to keep you. I don’t know where this ends for me. But I know it ends with Thomas dead. I didn’t want you involved with that. I couldn’t stomach the idea of being another person to drag you down. When Nic died, he left you alone and abandoned.”
Her gaze turned murderous. “Don’t you dare say his name.”
“Tell me your entire life wouldn’t have been better if he’d walked away from you a couple of weeks before he died.”
“This is not about Nic,” she snapped.
I stormed toward her, not stopping until our whole bodies were flush. One of my hands splayed across her lower back, the other landing between her shoulder blades. Her chest heaved in time with mine and her eyes were wild, but not with fear.
I leaned in close, brushing my nose with hers before saying, “Oh, but it is, baby. See, Nic was a young, dumb kid who thought he could take his diamond to the junkyard and leave with her still in his pocket. Only he died in that junkyard, and that diamond was stuck there until the day I found her. I wasn’t doing that to you again. I wasn’t dragging you down, covering you in my filth, and then hanging your ass out to dry when something happened to me. I wanted you out of there, despite the fact that I had to stay.” I hooked my thumb at my chest. “I watched you sleeping every fucking night for two months with dread pooling in my gut, feeling like my heart was being ripped out of my chest at the mere thought of losing you. But there was no solution. In order for you to escape that life, the Guerreros needed to die and I had to leave.”
“But you didn’t have to make me think you were dead,” she shot back. “Fine, you want the credit? Here you go. You were my knight in shining armor. I should be on my knees, thanking you right now. But you’ll have to excuse me. My knees are a little sore. I’ve spent the last few weeks on them, crying over you.”
“You think I wanted this? You think I wanted to let go of the woman who made me feel more alive in two months than I had in all thirty-seven years of my life combined? For fuck’s sake, the idea of you moving on, making a life with another man corrodes my veins. I know I hurt you, Cora. But I swear to God, I did the only thing I could think of to make your life better rather than making it worse.”
She closed her eyes, her entire face scrunching in pain. “Why didn’t you just tell me? I could have handled it.”
“I didn’t want to drag you into this hell.”
“I was already in it. Long before you were.”
“But I couldn’t watch you burn. You might not have been scared of the flames inside me”—I pounded the spot over my heart—“but I was. So that connection between me and you had to be severed, no matter how much it destroyed me.”
“You?” she accused. Her eyes popped open and the betrayal blazing within them tore me limb from limb. “So you decided to destroy me instead?”
“Destroyed is not dead.”
“Stop saying that,” she seethed. “It’s bullshit. All of it. This was never about me. The day you walked into my apartment and every single day after it, you were one big fucking lie. You swore to me that you weren’t looking for Catalina.”
“I wasn’t there to hurt her.”
“No. You saved that for me, right?”
“No,” I stated definitively.
Her lips quivered as she peered up at me. “You walked into my life, took one look around, and felt sorry for me? Was that it? You couldn’t save Lisa, so you decided to give it another try with me.”
Pressure mounted inside me. I wanted to yell at her that she was wrong. Shake her and make her understand. But I really just wanted this to stop. All of it.
“That’s not what happened at all.”
Her arms hung at her sides, and the emptiness in her eyes knocked the breath out of me. “You made love to me every night, stared right into my face, and lied with your body too.”
“Cora, baby. No. I never fucking lied to you like that.” I was losing her. She was standing there in my arms and I hadn’t even gotten her back yet. But I was losing her all over again. “Please. Just listen to me.”
“What else is there to say? The minute you got the answer about what happened to your precious wife, you threw some money at me like a whore and then left.”
My whole body tensed, the muscles in my neck painfully straining against my skin. Careful to control my tone, I gritted out, “It wasn’t like that. And you fucking know it.”
“I don’t know anything anymore! Nothing makes sense. Was any of it real, Shane?”
I hated the way she said my name. Like it was a curse all of its own. In a lot of ways, though, I supposed it was.
Because, no matter how much I wanted to deny it, Cora Guerrero had never been in love with Shane Pennington.
Not yet anyway.
I needed her to feel the honesty pounding in my chest, coursing through my veins, and flowing in my lungs.
Taking her hand, I lifted it to my chest, sealing it against me with both of my hands on top. “We are the truth, Cora. We are the only truth in this entire fucked-up situation.”
Her shoulders rounded forward in defeat. “I don’t even know what the truth is anymore.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Then what do you want me to say, Penn?” She flinched. “I mean…Shane.”
“Penn. Please, just call me Penn.”
“Why? So we can continue with the lie?”
My hand spasmed over hers. “It doesn’t feel like a lie when you say it. Cora, I’m sorry. For all of it. No, I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with you when this started. But you pretty much left me no choice. You’re an incredible woman. I knew that from the moment Lisa told me about you. But when I finally met you—”
She snatched her hand away like I’d electrocuted her. “What do you mean when Lisa told you about me?”
I swallowed hard and dug my phone out. “She came to Chicago after getting a tip about some girls getting into drugs and prostitution after answering online modeling ads. The cops weren’t doing anything about it, so she decided she would. Through that, she found the Guerreros.” I scrolled through my phone until I found a picture of her standing with Drew at a family Christmas party.
She was smiling at the camera, her brother’s arm draped around her shoulders. Pictures of her used to break me. Now, I was worried that they were going to break Cora too.
Turning the screen of my phone in her direction, I finished with, “And then she found you.”
I saw the exact moment recognition hit her. Her face paled and then her small body turned to stone.
“No,” she declared, scrambling away from me. “No, that’s not possible. That’s Lexy.” And then just when I thought I couldn’t hurt her any worse, a light of understanding hit her eyes before it shattered her. “Oh, God. Oh, God, you’re Shane. You’re Lexy’s Shane.”
Cora
Four years earlier…
“On a scale of one to ten, how bad would it be if we hit a drive-thru for dinner?”
“Bad?” River asked from the back seat. “That would be awesome.”
I smiled at her in the rearview mirror. She was getting so old, looking more and more like her dad every day. “Okay, but just this once.”
She threw a fist-pump into the air.
I laughed and put my blinker on, cutting across traffic to get into the turn lane. “You find any good books at the library?”
“Meh. Not really. They were all so pagey.”