She held up a hand and swallowed a hundred angry retorts that welled up in her throat. In the calmest voice that she could manage, Donna said, “I am not ready to talk about last night, or… or this morning.”
Her voice broke, and she hated it. She hated that everything seemed to be happening too quickly for her to handle. Donna liked to manage; it was what made her a great boss. At work, she was a goddess of capability. She was perfectly capable of handling twenty crises at once and put out twelve fires while schmoozing a persnickety client. It was what made her a fantastic businesswoman. But solving work problems was vastly different from solving personal ones.
Personal problem number one came tromping down the front steps with a liquid grace reserved for panthers and quicksilver. His eyes were as dark as sapphires in water and filled with concern. Oh God, not that. Anything but that. She could have taken him being cold and distant, or ever bitter. She would have relished in him being angry. It would have made everything easier. But that gentle look, so openly worried about her, was her undoing.
The first tear rolled down her cheek, then a second. She blinked and he was there, standing in front of her. The sun was perched behind him in such a way that she couldn’t see anything but the rugged masculine outline of him, but she could feel him. He was a wave of heat that hummed against her skin.
“Donna…” he started.
“I… I can’t.”
When his arms wrapped around her, she crumpled. He completely undid her. The wide span of his fingers splayed on either side of her spine as he pulled her gently toward him, and the feel of his bare chest against her wet cheek was a deep and abiding comfort to her.
He didn’t say anything or ask, and she was grateful. He just held here there beneath the Nevada sun as she cried out all of her frustrations. His body began to sway back and forth, and she swayed with him. One large hand lifted and brushed the hair off her face, tucking it gently behind her ear. With the other, he stroked up and down the length of her back as if she were a cat. It felt good.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said.
“For what?”
“Crying all over you.” She scoffed at herself, stepping away from the amenity of his embrace. He slid his hands down her arms, letting her step away, but didn’t quite let her pull back. The rough tips of his fingers held her wrists. Now that her eyes had adjusted, she could see lines of her tears down his chest. “God, I don’t normally do that.”
He smirked and gently squeezed her wrists. “What kind of man would I be if I made a woman feel ashamed of her God-given right to cry?”
“Men can cry too,” she said, wiping the tears from her cheeks.
“Oh, no doubt, but they ought to do it into beer, not on my chest.”
His lips quirked up as he said it, and she felt herself smiling in response. He managed, despite all the tattoos and the rock-hard muscle, to look affable. It was strange. Cody literally beat people up for a living, and Donna made people feel better in their work environments, but it was him who was more approachable.
“Perish the thought.”
“Unless it’s Chris Pratt. I’d forgive him wanting to cry on my chest.”
A small laugh worked its way across her lips. She crossed her arms and glanced around. There was a garden, she realized. Nothing was growing out of it right now, but it was clear that there had been recently. Plots of rich, dark earth still formed neat little rows in a fenced-in four-by-four shape. Donna wondered what he had grown. To the other side of the long house she could see a garage, but it was closed-up. There was a small patch of grass, healthy and green, tucked against a small rocked area that surrounded a pond.
“Nice place,” she said.
“It’s not much, but it’s home.” He stepped to one side and slid an arm around her back. “Come on in. Let’s see about getting you some lunch.”
“Why are you always feeding me?” she asked, letting herself be guided into his house. “I’m not scrawny.”
“No,” he said, the sound of appreciation turning the single syllable into a purr. “That you are not.”
The screen door swung shut behind them, and Donna got her first good look at Cody’s personal sanctum. It was cleaner than she imagined it would be, if a little cluttered. There was a long couch covered with a deep blue blanket, a television that must have been twenty years old at least, and a coffee table. All of these things were neat and orderly. It was the bookshelves that were taking up all the space.
There must have been ten of them, lined up from one side of the wall to the other. They were of various heights and widths, but every last inch of them was taken up with novels of every variety. If there was some kind of organizational system, Donna couldn’t decipher it. Worn paperbacks still sporting thrift-store stickers seemed to share space with modern leather-bound classics. Armor-clad adventurers peered out from the bright covers of some, where dark-noir detectives held smoking guns on others. It was, she thought, the strangest collection she had ever seen.
“Holy crap,” she said as she ventured farther into the living room.
“I like books,” he said, stepping around her.
“Yeah, I see that.” She perused the shelves, her curiosity warring with her desire to organize things. “It is a very impressive collection.”
He nodded as he walked past the last shelf and into a good-sized kitchen. It was neater here, with only one small squat bookshelf that seemed to be relegated to cookbooks. Their cracked and worn spines showed use.
“I lived on the reservation near Duck Valley with my mother and my sisters. We didn’t have a lot of money. No one really did. Most of the time people were just sort of struggling to get by, you know?”
She didn’t, not really. Growing up in Nevada, she knew that there were reservations and that their populations dwindled, but little else. It hadn’t really been covered in her local history class, and she had been so desperate to get away from here that she’d never bothered looking into it more. She kept quiet and let him continue.
“Beer?” he asked, rather than saying more on the subject.
“Why not?”
He opened the fridge and stuck his head inside before he began pulling out sandwich fixings, setting them on the clean counter space, and then two beers. He opened one bottle and handed it to her while he took the other for himself. She watched him take a long swig, the muscles of his throat working to swallow the amber liquid.
“My dad, if you want to call him that, didn’t stick around. He loved my mother, but she didn’t want to leave the reservation, and he didn’t feel like he belonged there. Maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. They fought a lot, they loved a lot, but ultimately the fighting won. He left before I was even in school. My mother was devastated. My sisters weren’t really surprised.”
“How many sisters do you have?” Donna asked.
“Seven.”
“Oh, wow.” She couldn’t quite keep the shock out of her voice.
He spared her a grin. “Good women, every last one. Got me used to dealing with tears in general.” His broad hand tapped the spot on his chest where it was still a little damp.
She bet it would. She took her own drink and lingered near the small, two-person table tucked into the nearest corner. A copy of this morning’s paper was splayed over the surface. Her eyes lingered on the front page, which depicted a broken window and a headline talking about a local store being robbed overnight.
“I always wanted a huge family,” she said, her fingers trailing over the newsprint. “I thought having twenty sisters would make me feel better.”
“Better?” he asked, opening a package of lunch meat.
“I didn’t have many friends when I was a kid. Sure, there was Jerry, but he was a boy and it was really hard to talk to him about my ever-changing Backstreet Boy crushes.”
“I would have pegged you as an *NSYNC girl, myself.”
“God no,” she said, placing a flat palm over her heart. “I mean, the Boys were iconic thro
ugh and through. *NSYNC just backed up Justin Timberlake.”
“Ouch, you really didn’t have a lot of female friends growing up, did you?”
“I didn’t have a lot of friends, period. There was Jerry, of course, and later there was… Rick.” Even saying his name made her feel cold. She crossed her arms and tried to ignore the memories it summoned.
He popped two pieces of bread into a toaster oven with some cheese. “Wow, I didn’t know you could turn a name into a curse word, but I am pretty sure you just managed it.”
“Well, there are some who deserve it.”
The toaster oven dinged, and he tugged the bread out. “Do you want to talk about it?”
The face of a sinfully attractive guy in a leather vest making promises as he backed her against a bike filled her memory. The feel of rich hands on her hips and the way her lipstick had looked on his mouth. More images of screaming in the middle of a cool winter night and him riding away on that very same bike.
“That’s a pretty firm no.”
“All right. Are you a mayo or Miracle Whip girl?”
“If it’s turkey I’ll have the Whip, otherwise mayo.” She meandered away from the table and back to the bookshelves. There wasn’t any dust on the book covers. That surprised her. She’d seen plenty of libraries. They usually belonged to the wealthy and the distinguished, filled with old books with older sentiments wrapped in gilded leather. Most of them were decorated with dust, proof that the owners wanted them just to have them, not to love them. It made her smile to see that he didn’t just have the books, he cared for them.
“Why did you leave?” she finally asked.
“Have you ever been on a reservation?”
“No,” she admitted, wondering why she felt guilty about that. “I can’t say that I have.”
“I won’t say it’s all bad. It’s not. There are some really great things about living there. You never really know the meaning of community until you see someone go through a tragedy on a reservation. When my dad left, we had the whole tribe coming around and offering any kind of help or comfort they could. If I was ever hungry, I could just wander over to a friend’s house and food would happen. If I needed some supplies for school and my mother couldn’t cover it, someone else just happened to have bought extra. That kind of thing. You feel like you are part of something.”
“But here you are.”
“Here I am, living alone and breaking the law.” He plopped the sandwiches together and brought a plate with a couple of single-serving bags of store-brand potato chips out to the living room.
She followed and settled herself on the couch next to him as he placed the plate between them. It was the second time that she’d be sharing sandwiches and chips with him, she realized. This felt more intimate than their time together at the Deli, bickering about whether or not he should have gone off with a model.
Cody took a bite of his sandwich before continuing. “Like I said, it was good to feel family, community, and being surrounded by people who looked like me. But there is some shit too, not the least of which is poverty.”
She thought back to the many years living in white-trash central. Her family rode the poverty line fairly hard. She could remember weeks at a time when dinner was hot dogs out of a forty-pack and the cheap quick-cook macaroni and cheese. “How bad?”
He didn’t quite meet her eyes when he said, “Bad enough. There aren’t a lot of what you might call career opportunities on the reservation. You pretty much have two choices: stay there and get drunk as often as possible, or get out.”
She picked up her sandwich but suddenly didn’t much feel like eating. “You got out?”
“I did,” he admitted.
“Just grabbed a bike and left?”
He laughed and laid his head on the back of the couch, staring up at the ceiling like he was remembering something. “Well, that came later. First came four years at NSU.”
She blinked, wondering if she heard him right. “You went to college?”
He took another healthy bite of his sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. “I did. I studied education and history.”
“That sounds a lot like you wanted to be a teacher.” She looked at him now, really looked. Could she see him standing in front of a classroom full of kids talking about the world that history books showed? There was a distinct possibility. He had a good voice, a good sense of presence, and if big bad biker guys and police officers didn’t intimidate him, certainly a group of kids wouldn’t.
He took a long drink. The sunlight caught the bubbles that swam through the beer, making them look like tiny pearls caught in amber. “Some of the few good people I remember on the reservation were the teachers. They tried really hard to be good people. They were some of the few role models we had, and I guess it made an impression. It doesn’t matter, I didn’t make the cut anyway.”
It was his turn to take a daily phrase and make it sounds like a curse. She found herself reaching out to touch his shoulder. “What happened?”
He put his hand on top of hers, giving the fingers a light squeeze that she interpreted as gratitude. “Discrimination doesn’t really stop after high school. I made the mistake of adding in a little too much off-the-books history while trying to get my training hours together.”
“Off-the-books history?”
“Some of the things I was taught growing up.” He finished off the last of his sandwich and chased it with beer. He shook his head and let out a breath that could almost be called a sigh. “Weirdly enough, most parents don’t want their kids coming home crying about the other side of Thanksgiving and other aspects of colonization most prefer to be glossed over.”
She winced and rubbed her thumb across his shoulder. “I’m really sorry.”
He shrugged and sat forward just enough that her hand slid free from his shoulder. “It’s partly my fault. I was asked to apologize, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t want to. I didn’t think I should.”
“You got proud.” She didn’t mean for it to come out as an insult, but it did.
He eyed her. “You might know a thing or two about the difficulty of eating a share of crow.”
She laughed and began to eat a sandwich that went down a lot better than swallowing her pride. “Mmm. Good sandwich. Well done. Did we ever get around to talking about why you have a metric ton of books?”
“Nice segue, very smooth.”
“I try.” She fastidiously wiped a few crumbs from her fingers and set the plate aside.
He patted her leg and nodded. “I’ll let you have this one as you are clearly having a crappy day.”
“I appreciate it.”
He lifted an arm in an invitation for casual snuggles.
She eyed him dubiously. “I’m not really here to get cozy.”
“Maybe you aren’t,” he said, wrapping his arm around her and tugging her close. “But you haven’t finished the food I made you, and you pretty much broke down outside. So, I’m going to say that you need some coziness. I promise, I won’t get handsy with you… and I’ll tell you all about my amazing book collection.”
She raised an eyebrow. “It is a very good sandwich.”
“You keep complimenting my food and I’m going to think you like me or something.”
She slumped her body against his. He smelled nice, like spice and cinnamon and man. Donna wasn’t sure if she hated how easy it was to curl up with him on that old couch in the middle of nowhere, or if she was comforted by it. It was probably a little of both.
“Tell me about the books.”
“Like I said, we were poor. No television, and Wi-Fi wasn’t a big thing. But there was a little bookstore, new and used, just on the edge of the reservation. One day a month you could get four used books for two dollars. I could usually cobble that together. It started with those novels where the kids get to change into animals and just kinda went from there.”
“That’s pretty adorable.”
“I was an adora
ble kid. Do you read?”
“I’ve been known to flip through some pages. Not as many as you. But as I said before, I didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of friends.”
He squeezed her close, and it felt good. It was so easy to get lost in him—too easy. That had been half the problem this morning. He had been there, and she’d nearly fallen asleep with his body tucked up against hers. It was too much far too soon.
“So why the cooking?” she asked. He tensed, and she was close enough that she could feel it. “If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine.”
“How about we go back and forth. You tell me something about you, and I’ll answer your question.”
“You wanna go all quid pro quo on this?” She lifted herself off his shoulder just enough to see his face. His eyes, so damnably blue against all the gold-brushed terra cotta of his skin, peered down at her. She felt a spike of lust run itself through her body with enough force that it nearly hurt.
BAD INFLUENCE: A Dark Bad Boy Romance Page 17