Burn It Up

by Cara McKenna

  Vince broke the heavy silence. “Beer?” he asked the room at large.

  Miah shook his head, gaze on the floor.

  Casey shook his, too. “I’m helping Abilene move any minute.” At least she’d agreed to let him help. She didn’t hate him—she just couldn’t love him. Last night she’d let him watch Mercy again while she went in for a short shift at Benji’s, and he hoped she’d keep relying on him. He cared about that baby, more than he’d ever have guessed he might, and to hear Abilene say she wasn’t comfortable with that anymore . . .

  He sighed and stood.

  “Grab me a bottle while you’re up,” Vince said. “Looks like I’m drinking for everybody.” And given that it was noon on a Thursday, he’d told his bosses at the quarry to go fuck themselves. Certainly not the first time.

  Casey fetched him the beer, then headed up to check on Abilene’s progress. He knocked softly on the door.

  “Come in.”

  He found the room nearly stripped. The bed where they’d come together was bare to the mattress, the bedding rolled up in a tangle at its foot. “Wow, that was quick.”

  She smiled and shrugged. “I never had much to begin with. Was that the news you guys were watching?” He’d filled her in on the previous morning’s events yesterday afternoon.

  “Yeah. Bean died of shock in the back of the ambulance. From the drugs as much as anything, it sounds like. Not from Miah shooting him.” And it seemed the man had spilled enough to implicate himself before he’d gone under for good, if not to name any of his alleged bosses. “If anything, Miah’s going to wind up a folk hero,” Casey said. “People around here loved his dad, and they love justice.”

  “I guess that’s something. That he won’t be in trouble, I mean.”

  “It’s a lot. Last thing the ranch can handle right now is to lose two of its owners.”

  Christ knew poor Christine was in no shape to handle it all on her own. Some of her family had arrived from out of state, at least—two sisters and one of their husbands. They were downstairs now, cooking and handling the endless incoming calls with stern efficiency. The phone seemed to ring ten times an hour, but never with any insight into who’d wanted Miah dead, or why.

  Abilene didn’t ask Casey anything more about the news, and he didn’t blame her. Everyone had information overload, and that combined with the grieving was enough to fatigue anybody. It reminded him way too much of the aftermath that had followed Vince’s exposure of the now-late Sheriff Tremblay’s involvement in Alex’s death.

  “Can I help with anything?” Casey asked.

  “You could break down the crib,” Abilene offered. “If you can find the right screwdriver.” She paused, gaze catching on his left hand, its first fingers wrapped in a bandage. “What happened to you?”

  “Nothing, just a little nick.” Just a nasty little flesh wound from a pair of wire cutters, from when he’d been furiously snipping his old cell phone’s SIM card into tiny slivers that morning. He’d lost himself in a frantic fit of anger, and his finger had paid the price. The rest of the phone had met its maker courtesy of a hammer, and he’d enjoyed every seething, righteous moment of it. He knew what that phone had been, with hindsight—an escape hatch. He’d hung on to Emily’s number, kept himself accessible in case he ever needed an out, an exit ramp straight back to easy street for when the going got tough around here. In the wake of Don’s death, he hated what that phone represented. He hated himself for having hung on to it for so long, and had felt better once those plastic shards had disappeared into their shallow grave . . . if only a little.

  He held up his hand, pressing his finger and thumb together and pretending the pain didn’t scream like an unholy bitch. “It’s nothing, plus I’m right-handed. I can handle the crib.” Anything for you. Anything she needed, anything she asked for. As for himself, he’d never needed to collapse into somebody’s arms as badly as he did hers, right now. Except he couldn’t. And he knew better than to even wish it.

  He wasn’t a fool. He wasn’t going to play the same part he had since the fall, Mr. Useful, Mr. Reliable, and expect that, given time, she’d get over his past. Because it hadn’t been completely in his past, just like she’d called it. He’d been considering that last job. He squeezed his hand into a fist, just to make his finger shriek.

  He carried the bedclothes down and left them on the washing machine, found a couple screwdrivers in the Churches’ junk drawer.

  “Success,” he told Abilene when he joined her back in the room.

  She smiled politely, checking the caps on her toiletry bottles before tossing them in a suitcase. Something flashed at her throat.

  The cross, he realized, taken aback.

  “You’re wearing it,” he blurted.

  She blushed and put her hand to the pendant, nodded.

  “I wasn’t sure if you would.”

  “I wasn’t, either. But these last few days . . . Let’s just say I’ve needed it, more than ever.” She pressed it to her skin with her fingertips, like a tiny prayer, maybe. “Thanks.”

  He nodded and decided to let it rest at that. It was too dangerous to read anything into it. Dangerously hopeful.

  The baby was in the crib, and she stared up at Casey with those wide blue eyes. Then she smiled at him. He smiled back, remembering the couple weeks before she could do that, back when he and Abilene had debated every little expression on her face. Happy or gassy? He straightened to look at Abilene.

  “Okay if I take her out?”

  She laughed, the sound like bells, cheering him some. “I didn’t expect you to take it apart with her still in there.”

  “No, I just . . . I wasn’t sure if you wanted me doing that now. Touching her or whatever. I know when I’m babysitting, it’s different, I didn’t want to assume. Or seem too familiar, I guess.”

  Her smile faded and her brows drew together, unmistakable hurt. She crossed the floor to stand beside him by the crib. She spoke to him but looked at her daughter.

  “Of course you can still touch her. I don’t hate you, Casey. I just can’t be with you, how we were. You do understand why, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, of course.” And better now than ever, after everything that had happened.

  She sighed, shoulders looking heavy. Finally she straightened and met his eyes with those startling ones. “I promised myself when I found out I was pregnant, I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes I had been. One of those mistakes was falling for the wrong guys, again and again. And believe me when I tell you, you’re wonderful. You’ve treated me better than any other guy I’ve been with, and you’re way nicer than any of them. Better in every way. But you’re still . . . The things you did, and that you were thinking of still doing. It’s illegal, and it’s dangerous. For you and for other people. I can’t let that kind of thing slide anymore.”

  “I’m never taking another one of those jobs ever again,” he said.

  She looked away, shaking her head. “I want to believe that. But even if I knew it was a hundred percent true . . .”

  He nodded. “You don’t need to explain.” Never had he been so crystal clear on his own shortcomings, and how they must seem to an outsider. He’d had to fill Miah in some, to explain why he’d been poking around in the ruined barn to begin with when he’d found the lighter. It had curdled his guts to spill it all, knowing that the man had just lost his father to arson. Miah had taken it in stride, but Casey had felt dirty, deep down in his heart. Ashamed.

  But it was too late for those feelings now, where Abilene was concerned. He’d had his chance to say the right things—to feel the right way about his own past—and he’d fucked it, thoroughly.

  He half wished he was doomed to lose his mind, now and then. It seemed like the only thing that might spare him suffering the burden of this regret for the rest of his life.

  Chapter 29

  You don’t need to explain. Those words echoed in Abilene’s head as she got the baby into her sling and hefted her bag.


  If only I could. She knew she couldn’t be with him. She’d known it with perfect clarity just a few days earlier, but her sense of the reasons was growing fuzzy. Catastrophes had a way of putting things in perspective, of making minor horrors seem less atrocious by comparison. She couldn’t be with him because . . . because . . .

  Because he was selfish, and dangerous.

  But what was selfish about risking his own skin, helping Miah hunt down the man who’d killed Don? He’d willingly told the authorities he’d snooped in a closed crime scene. He could’ve been investigated, maybe even gotten busted for all those jobs he’d pulled in Texas. He could have gotten killed going after Bean with Miah, had the man been carrying his own gun that morning. A selfish person wouldn’t have done either of those things.

  A selfish man wouldn’t be helping a woman move, once he knew he had no chance of getting in her pants again.

  And a selfish man wouldn’t have sunk his life savings—shadily earned or not—into a foundering business in a last-ditch attempt to preserve something authentic in a community soon to be beset by outsiders.

  He had been selfish. There was no escaping that fact, yet since he’d come home he’d been anything but. Even that dumb-ass move, considering taking one last job . . . Even that, he’d wanted to do for her. She believed that. For all his faults, all his crimes, he wasn’t a liar, she thought, watching as he sandwiched the crib’s mattress between its sides, screwdriver tucked into his back pocket.

  “Be careful.” She held her breath as they headed downstairs, worried he might trip and break his neck trying to carry it all at once, but they reached the ground floor without injury.

  They found Miah alone in the den.

  “Did Vince head out?” Casey asked him.

  “Yeah. I told him to after he’d finished his beer. I need to get outside, check on how the hands are getting on with everything.” He eyed their loaded arms. “Need help?”

  “Nah,” Casey said. “It’s only a couple trips.”

  Miah got up all the same, no doubt eager for a distraction. “I can at least take her off your hands while you get the convoy organized,” he said, gesturing at the baby.

  “Oh yeah. That would be helpful.” She set down her suitcase and got the sling off, and handed Mercy over. “Thanks. We’ll be quick.”

  The two cars were loaded inside ten minutes, and Casey stayed outside, trying to get the Colt’s trunk to shut around the crib’s cumbersome corners. Abilene went back in to give the guest bathroom a final sweep, then downstairs, where Miah was settled back in the rocker with the baby propped against his chest.

  “We’re fixing to head out . . . I’m sad I won’t be able to say good-bye to your mom,” she told him. “And tell her thanks for everything. All of you. I can’t say how much it’s meant.”

  He opened his mouth. Closed it. She waited patiently, and at length he looked her in the eye and said, “Sit for a sec.”

  She perched on the couch arm. “Yes?”

  “Casey said you guys are . . . Well, that you had been something, but now you’re not.”

  She flushed, but nodded. “Yeah. That kinda sums it up.”

  “That’s all I know about it, that and the fact that he said he f—that he messed something up,” Miah corrected.

  “It’s not quite that. There were just some things in his past that I couldn’t get on board with.”

  Miah nodded. “He sorta filled me in, too, after the fire. It’s fucked up—I won’t lie.” He shot the baby an apologetic look for the cuss. “Sorry. But anyway . . . I mean, maybe my opinions about it are skewed, given how shady my best friend is, but I hope that if you two were something special to each other, that you’ll be able to forgive him, sometime. That’s completely your choice, obviously, but I just wanted to say, he’s changed.”

  She nodded, hoping that was true. He’d been a bad man before he’d come home, but he was trying to be better now. Maybe not quite nailing it, but trying.

  “More changed than you could possibly know,” Miah went on. “I grew up with the kid, and sure, he’s changed a lot since he was twenty, but he’s also changed a ton in just the past few months. Since he met you.”

  Unsure what to say, she simply held his gaze, wondering what was next.

  Miah sighed. “I’m such a wreck just now, I’m probably not even making any sense. But just know that . . . that he’s different, because of you. The Casey who came back to Fortuity would never have bought that bar, or agreed to stick around for his mom, or done everything he has for you and the baby. Something’s changed in him, and while I can’t say exactly what did it, I have no doubt you’re part of it. He’s gone from self-serving to damn near selfless in the last six months. He’s far from perfect. We all are. But he really is trying.”

  “I know. But it’s still a lot to process.”

  “I’m not saying he’s right for you or anything, and I won’t pretend I know exactly why you had to end things. But if it was good, and it was real, and all you need is to forgive him . . . I don’t know what I’m saying, except that good things don’t come along every day. And sometimes the ones that do are worth working for. None of my business, obviously. But for the first time since I’ve known that man, he deserves some credit.”

  She felt her throat tightening, tears brewing, and found her fingers reaching for her cross. She was half-surprised to find something there to clasp once more.

  She nodded. “He does. He’s been amazing to me, and I don’t want him out of my life. Or hers,” she added, nodding to Mercy. “But he can’t be the one for me, I don’t think. It’s too much to explain, but it’s as much about me as it is about him. I’ve made the same mistakes, again and again and again in my life. And it’s time to quit making them.”

  Miah looked sad to hear that. “I think he feels the same way.”

  That had the tears officially threatening to fall, so she rose and started getting the sling back on.

  Miah sighed. “I’m sorry. That was none of my business.”

  “He’s your friend. It’s fine.” Just hard, so hard to hear, when she was already having such a difficult time committing to the decision she’d made. She took the baby back and settled her in the cotton straps.

  Miah’s face was so full of pain, she thought. She and Casey not working out was trivial compared to what his family had just suffered, but it must hurt all the same, knowing yet another good thing had been lost.

  “Give your mom my best,” she offered, feeling lame. “Take good care of her, like she did for me and Mercy.”

  He nodded. “Always. It was nice having you guys here.”

  “Good luck with everything.”

  “You, too.”

  And with a quavering smile, she turned and headed for the front.

  Casey was leaning on the hood of his car, looking at his phone. He tucked it in his pocket when the clatter of the closing door announced her arrival.

  “Got everything?”

  “I think so. Sorry to dawdle—I had to say good-bye to Miah. Say thanks and all that.”

  “Course.”

  He helped get Mercy into her car seat, and they each climbed behind their wheels and headed for town.

  She eyed the farmhouse in her rearview. She’d been here just over two weeks, yet it had felt like a major, formative phase of her new life. Saying good-bye to Miah had been hard, but it was the next good-bye that she truly dreaded. Saying good-bye to Casey, this afternoon. He’d still be her boss, and hopefully her friend, but he’d so very nearly been so much more. She’d be saying good-bye for now, but also good-bye to everything they’d been for each other, this past week.

  Will I greet him in a few months, when I come in for my shift, and still feel all this? All the longing and the sadness, the regret that they couldn’t have been more?

  Miah’s words echoed. He’s different, because of you.

  And she was different because of him. She had more faith in men than she had before, maybe ever
. Faith that she could attract a guy who’d treat her well, respect her, worry about her, and be kind without expecting a thing in return. Maybe she’d managed to fall for yet another criminal, but she’d picked a good one, for a change.

  For a change. She’d changed.

  And he wants to change. He had changed, to hear Miah tell it.

  She tried to imagine how this would’ve felt, if he hadn’t been involved in all those dangerous things. If he’d been the good one, and she’d been the one whose confession had put an end to all of this. If she’d sat down and bared her soul and her past, and he’d told her, Sorry, but I can’t be with you. You’re too damaged. What had she told him, with her decision? Sorry—you’re too bad. Too crooked. Too selfish.

  Yet he’d never been any of those things with her. So much the opposite, in fact, that she’d been shocked to hear about the things he’d done.

  She nearly wished they’d never decided to share their pasts. Things could have continued, all blissful and ignorant. Blissful and passionate and fun and affectionate, and she could have discovered what the tiny bud of their nascent family unit might’ve grown into.

  Would things have been different, if they were in love? If they’d said those words aloud, made some kind of commitment before that conversation had happened?

  I think I was already in love with him, so what does it matter?

  It did matter, though. It would have mattered if she knew for sure he felt the same. Would have been so much harder if he’d ever told her, I want that baby to call me “Dad” someday. Oh Christ, that would’ve made it a million times harder to end it. And not because of the security offered by such a statement, just because . . . because . . .

  Because it would’ve been real.

  She stared at the silver of his bumper as they stopped at the only light in town, a block from Benji’s. And it struck, like a slap.

  It was real. He has told me those things. A hundred times in the last few months. Never in words, but in action after action after action. Every time he’d shown up with groceries, unbidden. Every time he’d offered to babysit. Every sleepless night he’d suffered, every bottle he’d warmed, every time he’d driven her to town, every cross word he’d had for her ex. Every dollar he’d considered earning and giving to her, no matter how terrible that idea had been.