by Vanessa Vale
“They could.”
“You wouldn’t have gone off with them if you truly believed they’d hit you.”
“Poppy, they pretty much kidnapped me.”
“And you let them.”
I remained silent. I did know they wouldn’t physically harm me, but I remembered how I’d felt when I’d walked away from Chad. Empty. Broken. Less. The worst of it all was that I’d been in love with him. That had made it hard to want to leave, but he had destroyed me and I’d known I had to get out.
Looking back, it had been a toxic love and I’d come through the hurt better and stronger. It didn’t mean I wanted to go through that again. Heartbreak was heartbreak. It was easier to guard my feelings than to have them destroyed.
“The other night before the party, you had Finch in handcuffs on my floor. Shane was standing there, hands raised in surrender. They could have taken the gun from you, but they didn’t even raise a finger.”
They hadn’t. While Finch hadn’t liked having his shoulder torqued, he hadn’t resisted. Neither had Shane. Most guys of their size would have, especially with someone smaller like me. They hadn’t even touched me. It could have been because I’d been in my underwear, but again, most guys would have done so because of that. I hadn’t been forward. I’d been barely dressed. I’d touched them first.
“Just. Sex,” I said again, perhaps more for myself than for her.
“Fine. When are you going to have just sex with them again?”
I could imagine her making air quotes as she spoke.
Nix came back with two steaming cups of coffee and set one on my desk. I looked up at him and smiled, whispered a thanks.
“You really want the answer to that?” I asked her.
She laughed. “Probably not. They’re good guys. Take your time and have fun. Get to know them. You’ll like what you discover, I promise.”
I’d liked what I’d discovered so far a whole hell of a lot. Their washboard abs. Muscular thighs. Gentle hands. Skilled mouths. Soft words. Powerful thrusts. Deep laughs. Penetrating gazes. Comforting holds. Sexual caresses. “One would think you’re getting commission for all the upselling you’re doing.”
“Shane’s had to deal with shit about our dad since… forever and hasn’t found a woman that’s, well, worthy. As for Finch, you know what happened with him. It hasn’t made it easy.”
I frowned. “No, what happened with Finch?”
“His arrest.” Through the phone I could hear a bell ringing. She was at the middle school a few blocks south of the town library. There weren’t snow days in Cutthroat, no matter what the accumulation, so it was Monday as usual for her. “Look, I’ve got to go to a staff meeting.”
She hung up.
Arrest? Finch?
8
EVE
I grabbed my coffee, took a sip of the dark brew. Nix knew how I liked it with just a splash of milk. Swiveling my chair, I turned to my computer, looked up Finch Anderson in the database. His data came up. It confirmed his address, age and DMV records for his truck, snowmobile. I pushed a few more buttons and ran a criminal history. With high-tech speed, there was his arrest.
Oh shit. Assault.
I glanced up when the chief came in, but didn’t pay him any attention beyond a quick hello. How could I when the guy I’d spent the weekend with, the guy who’d handcuffed me to the bed and made me come on his face, had spent three months in jail for assault?
I pushed my chair back, fumbled for my cell in my purse and stood.
“Be right back,” I said to Nix but didn’t look his way as I walked off. I found an empty interrogation room, shut the door and leaned against it.
I took a deep breath, then dialed Finch.
“Hey, sugar.”
“You went to jail for assault and didn’t tell me?”
There was a pause.
“That was a long time ago.”
“So?” I snapped. I began to pace in the small room.
“Did you read the full report?”
“I got caught on the word ‘assault,’” I replied.
“Would you like to hear the full story?” The music that had been in the background cut off. I pictured him in his cowboy hat working in his barn or stable. Fixing his snowmobile. Tossing hay. Maybe he was in his truck.
I sighed, tucked my hair behind my ear. “Yes, of course.”
“It was the year after high school. A friend of mine, Shelly Montez, was being harassed by a guy. We’d gone through school together. We weren’t close or anything, just hung out some. But there are only so many places to hang out in Cutthroat, especially if you’re not old enough to drink.”
Whoever used the room last hadn’t pushed in the chairs, and I walked around the table and slid them into place absently as I listened.
“That didn’t mean we didn’t drink, but we couldn’t do it in the bars. So we went to people’s barns. The back forty of someone’s property. Trailheads. Wherever. That time, we were at the Cutthroat lake. A guy was into Shelly, putting the moves on pretty hard. She said no. He didn’t like it and grabbed her to go with him. I stepped in and we fought. I won the fight, and Shelly left with her friends. The next day I’m charged with assault. The guy was a Richie Rich from Cutthroat Mountain, and his daddy was pissed.”
“You’re not exactly the poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks. You have a big chunk of land. I’d say your family has some money.”
“That’s land, not cold, hard cash. There’s no comparison between a trust fund and acreage. I went to jail for three months.”
Anger and helplessness settled over me like a heavy blanket. I could only imagine how Finch had felt when he’d done the honorable thing defending a woman and he’d ended up in jail for it.
“Wow.” I felt like an idiot for jumping to conclusions. “I’m sorry.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute, and it made me squirm. “Tell me, sugar. Why are you so upset?”
“Why?” I went to the wall and fiddled with the buttons for the intercom system to the observation room.
“Yeah. All you want with us is sex. It shouldn’t matter that I’ve gone to jail if all you want me for is my dick.”
My spine stiffened. “That’s not fair.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I have to get back to work.” I didn’t like this feeling. Remorse, a dash of shame and a whole hell of a lot of confusion.
“You might want just a fling,” he began. “It can’t be just that for you. You care. Otherwise you wouldn’t give a shit about this.”
I pursed my lips, squinted my eyes shut, clenched my fist. He was right.
“Sugar, it’s okay to care.”
I couldn’t listen to him any longer. He was getting through to me in a way no one else had in years. I didn’t like the helplessness, the sense of vulnerability. “I’ve got to go.” I hung up, took a deep breath, then another.
Fuck.
I groaned, looked up at the ceiling. I cared for Finch. Shane, too. Too much, obviously, if I felt more than just sexual pleasure with them. I was in such big trouble.
FINCH
“You sure she’s coming?” Shane asked, checking his watch for the tenth time in five minutes. He paced across his living room as I watched.
I wasn’t any calmer, but there wasn’t room for both of us to wear out his wood floor, so I sat on the couch, my feet up on the coffee table. As soon as Eve hung up this morning, I’d called Shane. Pissed.
I couldn’t believe she’d held the assault against me. Besides the fact I’d done the time, the whole thing had been rigged. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to read the report and know that the system had been out to get me. I hadn’t gone to Cutthroat Academy. I’d woken up before dawn to do chores with the animals. I’d never been destined for the Ivy Leagues or to work for a hedge fund so I could buy a ski-in, ski-out mansion on the slope. Shelly’s family were farmers, so she and I had been a lot alike. It didn’t matter that we helped our families. None
of that mattered because Andy Wade had been a pussy and his father hadn’t wanted it known he’d had to beat up on a woman to feel good about himself. It had all been tossed onto me.
I’d been too wild. Too angry. Too dumb to know better. So I’d gone to jail. What the record hadn’t shown was what had happened since then. Shelly was married now with two kids living on a ranch near Great Falls, happy. Andy Wade had been put into rehab twice before he was twenty-five and was now doing five years for selling cocaine. Daddy hadn’t been able to get him out of that one.
“She texted at lunchtime and wanted to meet. Thanks for offering to do it here.” I looked around his place. Landscape photos on the walls. Basic furniture. “It’s handy that it’s just down the street from the station. No way do I want her changing her mind on her drive out to my place.”
“No problem. Sometimes I forget I even have it.” Shane stopped, glanced about.
I looked around some more. “I think the last time I stayed here was over the summer when we went to that beer festival.”
There was a knock on the door, and Shane rushed to open it. He let Eve in.
“Sorry, I’m a little behind. Mac called and said my car was fixed. I guess it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. I went and picked it up.” She looked around. “Explain to me how you have this place and you never stay here,” she said as Shane took her coat and hat.
“I bought the place after college but quickly learned that when my dad was in town, the paparazzi hounded him and me. I’m sure you’ve learned popularity by association is a big thing in Cutthroat.”
She bent down to undo the laces on her boots, and I almost groaned at the sight of her perfect ass. “Definitely. He was here filming a movie in the fall. I saw him once at the Gallows with a bunch of people.”
“That bunch of people were probably all strangers,” Shane clarified. “At least to you and me. To him, there are no strangers. I’m not like him. I don’t give a shit about popularity. You might want it, but only until you have it. I don’t talk with my dad, no matter what the tabloids say about Eddie Nickel, the family man. Especially them.”
“I take it your dad’s not a nice guy?”
Shane’s jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed. He took a deep breath, then spoke. “He hit. Took his anger and frustrations out on me and Poppy. It lasted until I was big enough to hit back. Then he stopped.”
“I can see why Poppy hates him,” she said, her voice neutral. Flat.
“I wanted to go into forestry, studied it in college. I admit it was partly to spite my dad, but it’s what I love. I don’t touch a dime of his money. To me, it’s all tainted with lies.”
“And Poppy burns through it as her own way to fuck with him.”
Shane nodded. “The job came with a cabin on government land, and I took to staying there. Simpler. Quiet.”
“Can’t the paparazzi just follow you out there?”
Shane smiled. “The can and they have. But I’m allowed to carry a gun on forest service land, which gives me an advantage.”
She set her boots on the mat by the door and stood back up. “I’ll bet.” She gave him a small smile, then looked my way. In just her socks, she came over to me. Her hair was long down her back, a little staticky from the dry air.
I stood.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Sugar, you’re not the first person who’s been bothered by my time in jail.”
“I had access to all the facts, and I still jumped to conclusions.”
I appreciated her honesty, the way she owned up to her mistake.
I took her hand, which was fucking freezing from being outside, and pulled her toward the couch. I dropped onto it and tugged her onto my lap.
“This is… I can’t remember the last time I sat on someone’s lap.”
I settled my hands on the curve of her hip and the top of her thigh.
“Get used to it,” I all but grumbled. She wasn’t getting up anytime soon.
She settled in, shifting, which only made me hard. Fuck, hard-er.
She’d apologized. I needed to explain. “I didn’t tell you about my record because to me, it didn’t matter. It happened ten years ago. I may have been found guilty, but I didn’t do anything wrong. Do you want to be judged by some of the things you did years ago?”
She huffed. “Hell, no.”
“As I said on the phone, if you’re using us just for our dicks, you wouldn’t give a shit if I was an ex-con or not. You probably wouldn’t remember our names, only that we got you off six ways to Sunday.”
“That night at Poppy’s party, we said, when you know, you know,” Shane said, sitting on the coffee table right in front of us so she was surrounded. “We want you, Eve, and not for just sex. You’re more than that. We’re more than that.”
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?” I asked.
Her lips thinned.
“I go with won’t,” Shane replied, setting his hand on her other thigh. “You feel something for us, and that’s what’s bothering you.”
“You two should be detectives,” she replied, her face tipped down so all I could see was her shiny hair.
“Tell us, sugar.”
I felt her deep inhale against my chest.
“I moved to Cutthroat to start over. To find myself again.” She paused. “Let me back up so it makes more sense. My dad left when I was a kid. Just walked out one day. I barely remember him, only that he had dark hair and a mustache I thought looked like a caterpillar. My mother is bipolar. Now that I’m an adult, I don’t blame him for leaving. She’s a disaster. I just wish he hadn’t left me behind.”
“Bipolar’s tough.” I didn’t know much about it, but mental illness in a family member was hard. As a kid?
“When she took her meds, she was good. Not great, but… even. I had meals, clean clothes. She remembered to pick me up from soccer practice. Hell, she remembered I played soccer. When she went off her meds, usually when she felt good for a long stretch because she was on them, it was awful. She blamed me for my dad leaving. She yelled, was belligerent. She forgot food. Stuff like that.”
I was sure the stuff mentioned was a long list. There was probably tons more.
“When I was twenty-two, I met a guy. He was great, until he wasn’t. He was like my mom in that he blamed me for things he did wrong. You’d think I would have avoided someone like him because of my mom, but maybe that’s all I knew. He was late getting home from work so the dinner was cold and he was mad. I wasn’t sexy enough and that was why he couldn’t get it up. Or, later, why he cheated. I was at the police academy, and he said I was a slut for being around all those men.”
“That’s all bullshit,” I said. The longer she talked, the angrier I became. Not at Eve, but at her mom. At this asshole who needed to be taken care of.
“I know now, but then… I only had my mother, who should have been a role model, as an example. I thought that what he said was right, that everything I did was wrong. Toward the end, I questioned my ability to do anything. I wasn’t sexy. I was stupid. I even started to think I really was a slut for wanting to be a police officer.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know now.”
“What happened?” Shane asked, his voice just above a whisper.
“He hit me.”
Every muscle in my body tensed. “Where is this fucker? I’ve got acres of land, and Shane’s got the entire forest to bury his body.”
“I didn’t think anything of it. I used makeup to cover it up. Until one day a woman came into the station. Domestic abuse. She told me stories that were really familiar. I’d been trained to offer counseling and a women’s shelter, which I did. I remember exactly where I was. It was like a lightbulb went off. I was her. I needed the counseling, that I was being used as a doormat and a punching bag to validate my boyfriend’s issues, nothing more.”
“Good for you,” I said, tipping her chin up with my fingers. I couldn
’t help but kiss her, to let her know we were here, that we desired her. That she was special.
She moaned, then turned her head away. “If you keep doing that, I won’t finish.”
I chuckled. She had to feel how hard my dick was at her hip. She couldn’t doubt my desire for her.
“I had my partner and a few guys help me move. I never looked back. In fact, I moved here to escape it all.”
“What about your mother?”
“She told me I shouldn’t have left Chad. That he was good for me, that I was stupid to walk away from someone like him.”
I shook my head. “She’s a piece of work. I’m sorry, sugar.”
She shifted and I let her stand. Sitting, we were both shorter than her. “I left her behind too. Haven’t heard from her since I moved here. That’s why I freaked with you. I trusted myself to spend the weekend with you, and I learned you were arrested for assault. It just made me realize I hadn’t gotten any better.”
“That’s bullshit,” Shane said.
“I know. I’m sorry I didn’t read the entire case file. If I had, I’d have seen what you did was honorable.”
It felt good hearing those words from her. It eased something in me, because it was crucial Eve understand. I wanted nothing between us, especially that shit from my past.
“You don’t do relationships because of your ex?” I asked.
She nodded and the hair she’d tucked back fell forward.
“I won’t go back to that.”
“We’re not here to hold you down, sugar,” I told her. “We’re here to lift you up. You wouldn’t want that guy to have this much control over you, would you? Because even after years, he’s still messing with you.”
She’d been so fucking strong and walked away from an abusive man. A mother who didn’t put Eve first… or ever in her life. She was beyond brave. Incredible. Yet avoiding relationships because they’d been shit in the past only meant those who’d hurt her still had control over her.
To break loose, she had to live. To love. And that was going to be with me and Shane.