She wasn’t sure how she felt about his jealousy, which was really possessiveness, and was far out of proportion to the seriousness of what they were doing, at least so far. He’d been jealous and possessive almost before they’d known each other at all. She was surprised to find that she didn’t completely hate it. But she had to tread carefully, because early indications suggested a tendency in him to deal with such matters with something other than diplomacy.
Still, she didn’t want to lie to him. They were figuring each other out, and she was trying to remember to stay open. She wanted to try a real connection for once, with Show, if he could make one with her. So, no fictions, no carefully crafted truths.
On the other hand, she didn’t want him leaping over the tables to rip David’s lungs out, either, and she thought he might take it ill if she actually described in any kind of detail what had happened before he’d arrived this evening. Thinking about it, she brushed her hand gingerly over the sore spot on her head. It wasn’t too bad anymore.
“He made a pass, yes. But he backed off.” Both of those statements were true and served as a fitting summary of the event, she thought.
“He doesn’t seem so backed off to me.” He sat up tall and looked over the half wall between their booth and the corner booth. “Those guys are both assholes.”
“It’s handled, Show. I don’t need to be rescued.” Setting aside the fact that she’d actually used him, inflating their relationship, to extricate herself from David’s advances, that is.
A hard look passed through his eyes. “I will not let you get hurt. Period.”
Feeling like they were treading on dangerous history, she smiled and put her hand over his clenched fist. “Nobody hurt me. It’s handled. Not the first time a man’s made a pass at me. Probably won’t be the last. You don’t need to get all Rambo when it happens. Even if something starts between us.”
His brows drew together. “You don’t think something’s already started here?”
“I think you said you needed to figure things out first, and that was not much more than a week ago. So, no, I don’t think something has already started.” Probably not true in the strictest sense—she knew she was pretty far gone over this guy already—but certainly true in the official sense.
Wendy came back then with Shannon’s beer and Show’s whiskey, straight, and two glasses of ice water. She took their orders—Porterhouse, extra rare, for Show, and a medium rare filet for Shannon—and left.
As soon as she was clear of the table, Show picked right back up. “Do you want something to start?”
“We need to get to know each other before there’s an answer to that question.”
He drank his whiskey down and set the empty glass at the outer edge of the table. “I think that’s a bullshit way to avoid the question. What do you want?”
And now she was pissed. She knew he’d been married a long time, but he couldn’t be so rusty that he thought picking a fight was a good idea on a date—a first date, in point of fact. “What are you doing? Why am I the one on the spot here? You’re the one who freaked out when we got close. Why don’t you tell me what you want?”
He didn’t answer. For long, uncomfortable seconds, they stared at each other, and if she had had any other way to get home, Shannon would have left. But Signal Bend didn’t exactly have a cab company, and she wasn’t about to go over to the Hollywood table and ask them for a ride back.
Finally, he sighed. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something else, try to have a nice supper.”
The next ten minutes or so were awkward and quiet between them, but they got a few more rounds, and their food came, and they found a way to chat. The dinner turned out okay.
He had some things to work out, definitely. And Shannon did, too. She hoped they could. She felt fairly sure that the thing that kept him in her head so much, and that made her feel so buzzy inside when he touched her, was the ‘spark’ she’d always talked about needing and had never found. Even when he frustrated her, infuriated her, hurt her, she felt something she’d never felt before: excitement. She’d never been excited about someone. She been pleased. Flattered. Content. But not excited. Show stirred her blood.
He took her back to the inn and walked her to the door. She didn’t invite him in. But she didn’t resist when he turned her around and put her back against the door, leaning into her and claiming her mouth, his hands clutching her head and her hip, his tongue deep and hard. She could feel his erection against her belly, like a steel rod in his jeans.
The feel of his beard brushing over her cheeks and lips, of his huge body leaning into hers, his hand covering the whole back of her head. The rich, male smell of him, whiskey and leather and man. She loved it all. Her hands grasping fistfuls of his kutte, she held him close, thinking maybe not having shaved wasn’t an absolute deal-breaker.
He tore his mouth from hers with a rough growl and kissed her jaw, her neck, her shoulder, pulling her jacket and sweater away so he could suck and nibble at her skin.
“Jesus, you taste…” He didn’t finish. Instead, he stepped back. Shannon felt dizzy and disoriented.
He took her chin in his hand, his thumb over her lower lip. “You ask me what I want. You. I want to be good for you. I got some things to work out before I’m any good for anybody.”
Not knowing what to say to that, she kissed the pad of his thumb. He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Sorry I fucked up supper. But I’ll see you soon.”
And then he was off the porch, down the steps, and firing up his bike. Shannon stayed on the porch, leaning against the front door, and watched until his taillight faded out of view.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Show sat and glared at the man and woman sitting on the couch to his left. Especially the guy. He hadn’t liked at all the way he’d locked onto Shannon at the Chop House the week before, and he wanted this piece of shit to feel damn uncomfortable now. Think twice before he made unwanted passes at women.
He didn’t care that his attitude was getting in the way of their interview. This whole movie was sitting wrong with him, now that it was starting to happen. It was sitting wrong with everybody. It was one thing to understand that the story needed to be controlled and that the town needed to control it—there were parts of the story that would hurt much more than help. It was another thing to sit facing a couple of strangers, outsiders, and have them ask the kind of questions they were asking. Personal shit.
The woman—Harrie—sat forward and cleared her throat. She was pretty, in a petite, delicate way, with long blonde hair and serious grey eyes. She looked like a smart cookie, and she had less slick to her than the asshole next to her. Show didn’t mind her as much. But they were asking questions he didn’t want to answer.
Harrie glanced back at her companion. David Gordon was his name. Then she turned to Show. “Let me ask it a different way. Of course you felt awful. I can imagine—”
Show interrupted. “You have kids?”
“No.”
“Then you can’t imagine. Move on.”
She nodded. “I understand why you don’t want to answer. But here’s the thing. It’s my—our—job to imagine. That’s what we’re here to do—imagine what happened and write the story. So we need your help. What were you thinking when you got to the hospital that night?”
Isaac was sitting at the bar with Bart, watching. Show looked past the writers on the couch and met his President’s look. Isaac hadn’t asked him to do what he was doing. Show had offered. Frustrated with the uniformity of the story the town was telling, the writers were starting to make noise about digging deeper, and Signal Bend had some secrets it didn’t want told. The Horde had retained approval over the script, and they were willing to torpedo the project if necessary, but that didn’t mean snooping writers wouldn’t learn things to use later, in ways that could hurt the town.
It was known that Signal Bend had been trading in meth. But that wasn’t the story. It wasn’t what ha
d brought the attention of the country to their tiny town, what had made the media make them heroes. The story was David and Goliath, a dying town that had faced a vastly more powerful force and won, a fight in which a handful of intrepid souls had taken down an empire. That was the story.
But the writers wanted prurient details to “punch things up.” They wanted Lilli’s story, which had been sketchy in the news, since the government had a vested interest in protecting her background. Enough of it was known, though—that she had been taken and tortured, and that she’d survived while her attackers had not—that the writers wanted the rest of it. They wanted more than those sketchy details. They needed a hook, something that would really make Ellis a villain, they said. Something that would explain the depths of his depravity. And Lilli wasn’t giving it to them.
So Show was giving them Daisy.
Or, at least, he’d volunteered to do so. The story couldn’t hurt her, and he’d insisted that Rosie and Iris not be part of it. Or Holly, for that matter. She wanted no part of the movie—other than a cut of his cut. In this fictionalized version, Show would be a single dad.
“What do you think? I was thinking that my girl was hurt and I needed to be with her.”
“Did you know what happened by that point? Were you thinking about revenge?” Gordon asked that question, and Show turned a cold eye on him. Gordon shifted uncomfortably. “Okay. I’m gonna go outside and make some calls. If I can get reception, that is.” He looked at Harrie. “You got this?”
“Sure,” the little blonde said. Gordon got up and pulled his phone out of his pocket, headed for the front door.
Harrie watched him go, then turned back to Show. “He’s a good guy, you know. And a great writer. I hope whatever you have against him isn’t, like, a race thing.”
Show scoffed. “No. Got a thing against arrogant assholes. Ask your questions.”
“Same question. When you got to the hospital, did you know what had happened to your daughter?”
“I knew enough.”
“And were you thinking of revenge?”
“Fuck! No—I was thinking about my family. Only thing I was thinking about. My girl and—” Show stopped cold, shocked by what he’d almost said to this little blonde stranger.
“And what?”
He wanted this interview over. He wanted Hollywood never to have come. They’d made a huge mistake letting them in. The town should have gone quietly back to its half-dead existence and just soldiered on. Hanging all this out for people everywhere to see, for people to pay money to be entertained by? It was fucking wrong. Even if they’d done it to protect the town, to help it. Everything about that time was wrong—what had been done to them, what they had done. This movie was wrong. It was wrong. It had to be.
Except it wasn’t. The story was going to be told, and this way they could be sure it was told right. What was happening now, this horrible conversation that tore Show in seventeen different directions, this was how they made sure it got told right and made things better. He was giving them details about Daisy to protect Lilli from having to relive her own horror. Daisy didn’t have to relive hers.
He leaned on his knees, coming close to little Harrie Beck, Hollywood screenwriter. “And how I let her down. How who I am brought that down on her. How I wasn’t there. How I let her live in a house that wasn’t safe, because I wanted a house that was quiet. How what happened was on me. What do you know about what happened? More than you’ve said?”
Harrie sat back. She started to sweep her fingers around on her tablet, but then she stopped. “The real story?”
Show nodded.
“Your wife and daughter were raped in your house. Your daughter died. Your other daughters witnessed it.”
Again, he nodded. “They raped her to death.” He sat back deep into the battered leather armchair. “Let me tell you about Daisy. She was fifteen. She was tall and real skinny. Long, bony arms and legs. She wore glasses and braces, and she kept her hair real short—a pixie cut, her mom called it. She hadn’t had her monthly yet. Hadn’t gotten any kind of a body yet, no hips, and flat as a board. A late bloomer, they call it, I guess. She was gonna be beautiful, you could see it, but she wasn’t yet. She hadn’t started thinking too much about boys yet, I don’t think. A couple of little crushes—her teacher, shit like that.” He looked over at Isaac, who was listening and smiling sadly.
“She was what people call a tomboy, not interested in clothes, liked being outside, getting dirty. Or being inside and reading. She was quiet but not shy. Whip smart. She had a light. I don’t know how to say it better. Just a light, pointed outward, like she knew her life wasn’t started yet, and she was looking out ahead to when it would. She wouldn’t have stayed in town long.”
Show felt his throat begin to clench, and he swallowed and cleared it. He barely knew what was going to come out of his mouth from one word to the next, but he knew he wasn’t going to stop. He didn’t know if he even could.
“When I went back into the room she was in, after the doctor told us she was gone, that’s not who I saw. That wasn’t my girl. That was a broken, empty thing. No light. They put out her light. And I let it happen.”
He stood, surprising little Harrie, making her flinch as if he were coming for her. “That’s when I got mad. We’re done, missy. That’s all you get.” He walked around the couch and headed for the dorms. Isaac intercepted him at the head of the hallway, reaching out to grab his arm.
“Show—hold up, brother. You okay?”
He was. He was raw and hurting, but he was more okay than he would have thought. He hadn’t said that shit to anybody. Not even Isaac. Why he’d chosen to tell it to the woman who was going to make it public, he had no idea. “Yeah. But I got something I need to do.” He pulled his arm free of Isaac’s grasp, slapped him on the back, and headed back to his room to pick up his jacket.
~oOo~
When Show stepped through the front door of the B&B, he was regaled by the sound of women laughing. It made him smile—and then he saw Shannon at the front desk, laptop open in front of her, a smile on her face as well. She was looking at him, though, and that smile was for him. She came around the desk as he walked toward her.
She put her hands on his chest and tilted her face up for his kiss. He caught her chin in his hand, his thumb over the sweet cleft in its center, and brushed his lips over hers. He liked this ease they’d found, the way she smiled when she saw him, the way he could kiss her, touch her, and have it be right.
“Hi. Did I know you were coming over?”
“No.” More laughter—it was coming from the kitchen, and now he discerned the distinctive, rolling laugh of Marie Bakke, of Marie’s diner. “What’s going on back there?”
Shannon rolled her eyes. “It’s like the Sisterhood of the Staying-Put Aprons in there. Marie Bakke and Rose Olsen are sitting with Beth. They said they came to talk recipes, but they’ve had about ten gallons of coffee—Irish, I’m pretty sure—and all I’ve heard so far is gossip, at full volume. It’s pretty good stuff, too—they all have stories about our California friends. ”
Show knew the reference she’d made, though it came with a bittersweet taste. That movie had been in heavy rotation in the DVD player at his house a few years back. Daze had really liked it.
“I expect everybody in town has a story or two about those folks. Omen’s been popping off about dragging the camera guy all over creation, too. Like he never saw a cow up close.” He rubbed his hand over her back. His need to touch her was riding him hard this afternoon. “Can you give me some time?”
“Sure. Come on back to the office.” She started to pull him, but he pulled her back.
“No—can you take a ride with me? I’ve got the truck.” It had been raining on and off all day, right on the brink of freezing. The night would be worse. Winter had landed.
“Oh, Show. I can’t. Our friends are checking out in the morning, and since they’re the only guests, and they’ve been here so long, we�
�re doing the nightcap up bigger than usual. I have to stay.”
Hooking his arms around her waist, he said. “I’ll have you back by then. It’s important, Shannon. To me, it is.”
She was clearly confused, her smooth, pale brow wrinkling a little as her eyes searched his. She put her hand on his face, and he closed his eyes at the tender touch.
“Where are we going?”
He smiled. “Just come with me. I’ll explain when we’re there. You got that kind of trust for me?”
As an answer, she leaned her forehead to his chest. He bent down and kissed her head. “Get your coat, hon. It’s cold outside.”
~oOo~
By the time he pulled up in front of the house, the weather was beginning to decline, and it was clear that Shannon was thoroughly confused. But Show’s resolve was unshaken. He got out of the truck, into the driving sleet, and ran around to the other side, helping Shannon out and pulling her close, under his kutte, as they ran up onto the porch. Protected from the biting rain if not the brisk wind, Show let her step away, and he went to the front door. But she grabbed the back of his kutte and pulled him back.
“Show, wait! Where are we?”
“Come inside, hon, and I’ll tell you.” He opened the door and held it for her. After a moment spent considering him, she stepped through. He followed and closed the door behind him, switching on the light. He was glad he kept the utilities up.
“Okay, Show. Enough mystery. What the hell? Whose house are we in?”
“Mine.”
She goggled at him. “What? I don’t—I thought you lived at the clubhouse.”
Her hair was wet and glistening with frozen raindrops. There was a drop dangling from her nose, too, and he reached out with a finger and brushed it away.
“I do. I haven’t lived here in over a year. Not since…well, that’s why I brought you here. What I want to tell you.” He took her hand. “Come sit.” If he could tell a goddamn writer, he could tell Shannon. He needed to tell her. She deserved to know. There was a compelling reason he had to bring her here to tell her. He had no idea what that reason was, but it was a compulsion.
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