Discover Me & You, A Devil's Kettle Romance: Book 2

by Susan Sey

  Love, she knew from bitter experience, wasn’t about the lover. Love — true love — was about the beloved. And Willa knew she had nothing to offer Matty. Nothing but damage. Nothing but a family tree full of violence, corruption and dysfunction. Revealing Matty’s true parentage might give Willa some faint claim to family, but there was nothing but shame in it for Matty. And she loved him too much, too purely, to do that to him. Not unless she had to.

  Besides, her silence had been bought and paid for.

  “I’m going to say exactly what I’ve always said,” Willa told Georgie. “Exactly what your mommy paid me to say.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Not a damn thing.”

  Willa’s truck was in the drive when Eli and Brett pulled up in the tuna can late in the afternoon. The sun was still high in the sky and it glinted off what little chrome was left on the rusty old Ford. In the passenger seat, Brett shook his head.

  “I can’t believe she still drives that thing. I got it before she was born, and it wasn’t new then.”

  “I get the impression that Willa knows how to hold on.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.” Brett compressed his mouth into a hard line. “But she ought to learn to let go. No sense holding onto things you’ve outgrown, things that aren’t good for you.”

  Eli eyed him. They’d hiked mostly in silence for the better part of eight hours. Eli had set a moderate pace that Brett had easily matched, and he hadn’t flagged. His eyes had proven sharp once Eli explained what they were looking for, and Brett hadn’t been lying about his appetite for the miles. Whatever was inside his head, whatever his personal noise was, the rhythm of his boots on the rocks seemed to quiet it. He’d been relaxed, almost easy, when they’d folded themselves into the tuna can for the ride back to Willa’s place. Each passing mile had wound Brett tighter, though, and now he was staring at Willa’s truck as if it was personally responsible for the mess Brett had made of his life and of his daughter’s.

  “And yet,” Eli pointed out softly, “here you are.”

  “Here I am,” Brett agreed, just as softly. “One more junky old thing she’s hanging onto.”

  “You’re letting her.”

  “I know.” His mouth twisted. “I never claimed to be strong, or to be good. That’s Willa you’re thinking of.”

  “You’re not weak. Not from what I saw today.”

  “There’s different kinds of weak, Eli.” Brett pushed open his door, put one boot on the ground. “I’m the kind of weak that’ll lean on anything sturdy enough to hold me when the need arises.”

  “Need arises, does it?”

  “When you’re fresh out of prison, you got nothing but need, and no choice but to ask for help where you don’t deserve it.” Brett planted the other boot on the ground, looked back at Eli. “But I’m not the kind of weak that’ll keep leaning when I’ve got my feet under me.”

  He shoved out of the tuna can — the piece of crap rocked like a small boat on a large ocean — and leaned back down to speak. “You coming in to explain about the tampons and hiking socks on the counter, or are you throwing me under that bus?”

  “Oh, I’m coming in all right.” Eli stepped out as well, headed for the porch. “I’m presenting that beauty in person.”

  Eli chuckled. “This I’ve got to see.”

  “You’re just jealous you didn’t think of it yourself.” Eli had one boot on the porch steps when the front door opened and Willa appeared above him, the mouse nest in her hands, her face cool and closed. “Hey, Willa.”

  “Eli.” She turned to her father. “Dad. Where have you been?”

  “Hiking with Eli.”

  Her brows rose slowly. “All day?”

  Brett winced. “I guess so, yeah.”

  “You’re supposed to be looking for a job.”

  “I was doing just that when Eli showed up.” Brett slipped his fingers into his pockets. “I’d been at it for at least a pot, pot and a half of coffee when Eli showed up with…” He nodded at the nest. “That.”

  Willa switched that cool, remote gaze to Eli. “You brought me a mouse nest?”

  “Not just any mouse nest.” Eli mounted the steps and leaned against the pillar holding up the roof. “That there is a one-of-a-kind, paw-crafted, multi-media masterpiece.”

  “Multi-media?”

  Eli smiled. “Best I can tell, it’s mostly my favorite hiking socks plus half a box of the tampons somebody left in the bathroom.”

  Willa blinked. “You brought me a mouse nest of dirty socks and clean tampons?”

  “Who said the socks were dirty?”

  “You said they were your favorites.”

  Eli grinned at her. “No flies on you, honey.”

  Her face went as blank as a sheet of fresh paper. “I’m not your honey.”

  “Sure you are. I brought you a mouse nest.”

  “Is that what it takes these days?” Brett mused. “I was in prison longer than I thought.”

  “Times change,” Eli observed.

  “I guess.” Brett rocked back on his heels, studied Willa’s face — still blank as a snow bank, Eli noted with concern — and said, “You know, I could use a shower. Knock off the trail dust.”

  “Good hiking today,” Eli said to him. “You want the job, it’s yours.”

  “I want the job,” Brett said.

  “What job?” Willa said.

  “The job I just gave him,” Eli told her. “I’ll pick you up at seven tomorrow,” he said to Brett. “There’s a section of state forest I want to have a look at, and it’s damn near in Canada.”

  “What kind of job?” Willa asked, each word icy and distinct.

  “Super,” Brett said, backing toward the door. “I’m hitting the shower.” Then he was gone. Coward.

  Willa arched a brow. “Well?”

  CHAPTER 17

  ELI LOWERED HIMSELF to the porch railing and patted the wood next to his thigh. “Sit with me?”

  “No.” Willa held the mouse nest in both hands, still as always. But there was a coldness to it now that Eli didn’t care for. A contained edge. The warmth, the generosity of it was missing, and Eli cursed himself for leaving her alone. He should’ve called, come over. For God’s sake, she’d given him everything — her body, her stillness. She’d given him peace. And in return, he’d gone dark, thinking of nothing but his own damn skin again, as relentlessly self-centered as always. Shame touched him with cold fingers. “What job, Eli?”

  “Well, there’s a little more on my plate here in Devil’s Kettle than those supervised removals of yours,” Eli told her carefully. “I’m also doing a fire risk assessment on the state and national forest lands up here.”

  “A fire risk assessment.” She didn’t make a question of it, only repeated his words with a cool care that stuck unpleasantly in his throat.

  “Yeah. There’s a DNR guy running the regional assessment team up here — a Paul O’Malley? He should’ve retired about a hundred years ago, and my uncle Ben has some concerns about the quality of his work. He’s at Boise now, Ben is, and—”

  “At Boise?”

  “Yeah. At the National Interagency Fire Center there. It’s an alphabet soup of all the agencies that fund wild land firefighting but since nobody could come up with a nifty acronym everybody just calls it Boise.” He tried a smile that she didn’t return. He cleared his throat and went on hastily. “They assess fire risk across the country, rank all open fires in order of importance, and deal out the resources accordingly. Ben basically gets to boss around every federally funded hotshot crew in the nation. He’s in heaven.” Willa only continued to gaze at him, her stillness growing into a chill that touched his soul. “You might think I’m outside Ben’s jurisdiction now that I’ve spent a couple fire seasons hiking instead of hotshotting but you’d be wrong. When I gave him my resignation letter, Ben just turned around and gave me a new job title — fire risk assessor.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It mean
s that wherever I happen to be hiking, I pay special attention to the fuel load. I take pictures, I make notes. If I start seeing too much ladder fuel—”

  “Ladder fuel?”

  “You know how you build a campfire? You start with dried grass or bark and then add in the twigs, then the sticks, then bigger sticks, until you’re finally up to logs?”

  She nodded.

  “Ladder fuel is like that, only for a forest fire.” He leaned in, warming to his subject even as he was aware that her chill only deepened. “Forests are supposed to burn, Willa. They’re designed to burn. And if you leave them alone, they will. They’ll do it often enough to clear out the scrubby underbrush that’s trying to choke them to death. And when we let that happen, everything’s cool. That brush is like kindling, see? It can’t burn hot enough to do any real damage to established trees. You can’t light a hundred-year-old oak tree with a match, right? But if you put out the fire every time the forest tries to clear that shit out, that scrubby underbrush survives. It gets taller and bigger, and bigger fuel burns hotter. Pretty soon, another layer crops up underneath the first one, and another one underneath that one until you have a ladder of fuel, from tinder all the way up to actual trees. And when a forest in that situation catches fire, the entire thing goes up. It burns hot enough to kill the trees when it should have only cleared the choking brush. The forest gets destroyed. Everything gets destroyed.” He paused, had to take a second. His throat was too tight and hot to continue unless he swallowed down that omnipresent lump of shame and guilt. “People get destroyed.”

  “That’s what you do now?” She tipped her head and studied him, so remote. So closed. “You hike through forests all over the country and you report back to your uncle if you think they’re getting ready to burn that way?”

  “Yeah. I do it mostly alone, but I’m allowed to hire per diem help when I feel like it’s necessary.”

  “Convicted felons?”

  He shrugged. “The Forest Service isn’t so fussy on that point. You’d be surprised how many convicts end up on hotshot crews. Some crews are prison-based, in fact. The inmates volunteer, and get bused to the fires in—” He cut himself off. Her eyes were deep in the shadow of the ball cap he’d decided he hated but it was clear that dropping Forest Service factoids into this conversation wasn’t doing him any favors. “Listen, I can’t work a crew again, not ever. I had brothers and I lost them. I don’t deserve to have more. Which is why I’m not offering your dad anything permanent. But the guy’s legitimately a monster hiker, a quick study, and could use a purpose. I have the budget to give him one even temporarily, and if I can prevent anybody else’s crew from facing the kind of shitstorm my crew faced a couple seasons back, I’ll do it.”

  She nodded slowly, her eyes never leaving his. “You’re going to be fine, Eli.”

  He frowned at her. “What does that mean?”

  “I was worried about you the other night. You hurt so much. You carry such a massive load. I didn’t know if you could keep going.”

  “I don’t know if I can.” And the admission itself was a weight off his shoulders. A slice of his brain wondered idly if she had any idea what she was doing to him. That she was busting effortlessly through a reserve that had held four separate grief and trauma counselors at arm’s length. That she was pulling things out of his soul that had been burned there so deeply he wasn’t even aware of them anymore, only of the infection they caused. “I really don’t know if I can, Willa.”

  “You can.” She handed him his nest.

  He reared back, hands up. “No, that’s yours.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  Pain shot through him, unexpected and agonizingly sweet. He hadn’t felt anything in so long before Willa. She went straight to the heart of him, though, and stripped him bare. “Yes, you do.” He didn’t know why he said it, only that it was true.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Of course you do.” She was lying to him. Why was she lying to him?

  She gazed at him, her silvery eyes wide and blank. “I don’t want anything from you, Eli. You have to understand that.”

  “But I don’t understand. I don’t understand at all. No, wait.” He palmed his face, shame renewing its grip on his soul. “Actually, I do. Willa, the other night was—”

  “—was lovely. Thank you.”

  “Lovely?” He stared at her, aghast. “Thank you?”

  “Yes, thank you. It was one of the better dates I’ve ever had.”

  “Jesus Christ. Willa, I banged you on the kitchen counter like I paid for the privilege. Then I let you pour me a drink while I unloaded my whole sad, sordid story on you. And then — just to prove what a prince I am — I maintained strict radio silence for the next several days, just in case you were harboring any romantic delusions that needed dispelling. For fuck’s sake, Willa. You gave me your body. You gave me your stillness. You gave me peace. And I took it. I thought of myself and I took, just like always. I should be thanking you.” He paused, shame rising sickly in his throat. “I should have thanked you.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have. That’s my point. We both got exactly what we wanted from that night. So just stop.” She set the mouse nest beside him on the railing. “Just stop, please. You don’t owe me anything. If you used me, I used you right back. So you don’t need to give me presents. You definitely don’t need to give my jailbird father a job assessing ladder fuels or whatever the hell it is you said you were doing. I don’t want anything from you, Eli.” She stepped back, tucked her fingers into the pockets of her filthy jeans. He wondered with that same detached slice of his brain what she’d been doing today that had rolled her through the muck again. Seemed like she spent a lot of time crawling through other people’s trash. “I don’t want you.”

  I don’t want you.

  Denial roared through him. Of course she wanted him. How could she not, when he wanted her so badly? How was that even possible?

  “We had a nice night,” she told him evenly. “We both needed something and we got it. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.”

  “But it is.” He blinked at her, reeling. “It’s incredibly complicated.” Complicated enough that he hadn’t had the courage to give her the thanks-for-a-fun-night-but-this-can’t-go-anywhere speech she was now giving him. A speech he realized — too late, of course — that he didn’t want to hear.

  “No,” she said with gentle finality. “It isn’t.” She nodded at the chewed up tampons and hiking socks beside him. “I’ll deal with your mouse problem. You can call it the second supervised removal. I’ll call you when a good opportunity for number three crops up. Otherwise, I think it would be best if you went back to radio silence.”

  Willa made herself turn and go back into the house while Eli was still sitting on the porch, staring at her. His eyes were enormous and blue over those sharp cheekbones. Baffled and a little bit pissed off but not hurt. Not sad. Not anymore. Willa would hold onto that, she decided, and slumped against the door she’d just shut on him. She’d hold onto that and let it comfort her. What had he said? That she’d given him her stillness? She’d given him peace?

  Yes, she decided, her throat tight and aching. She had. She could see that much for herself. That vast sorrow that lived in his eyes, the scent of rain that clung to him even in the baking sun? It wasn’t gone, but it had eased. And she’d done that for him. Not on purpose, either. Simply by being herself, her truest self, she’d lifted some of the burden that was grinding him down day by day, mile by mile.

  That, she told herself, was enough. It had to be enough. Hell, it was practically a miracle. Because the conversation she’d had with Georgie that morning had rubbed her nose in the incontrovertible facts of Willa’s life: maybe she wasn’t poison herself but she came from poison, which meant the best thing Willa could do for other people was to leave them alone. Forming connections with other people was just asking for tragedy. Somebody was going to get hurt. Abandoned. Rejected. Ridicule
d. Swindled. Possibly murdered, depending on who you talked to. Which was definitely taking things a step too far, considering that even Drunk Brett was no match for Shay’s ravenous survival instincts. But when had the truth ever mattered in this town?

  No, her history was just too complicated, her family too toxic. It was better to keep good people, innocent people, well clear of it. Of her.

  Oh, she wasn’t her family. She knew that. She was better. She was a decent person, and she proved it every time she weighed her crushing loneliness against Matty’s bright future and held her silence. She’d proved it again just now when she’d come home to find that Eli had brought her a mouse nest. He’d given it pride of place on her kitchen counter, putting it right where another man might put a dozen roses. He’d understood that to her, it might as well be.

  He’d seen her.

  The realization had landed in Willa’s chest like a hand grenade, dangerous and unpredictable. They’d had sex and some deep conversation the other night, but Willa hadn’t expected anything else. She couldn’t have anything else. She’d crafted her life as carefully as the mouse had crafted the nest Eli had left her, and one of the foundational pieces was her invisibility. Willa walked and talked and ate and worked right in plain sight but she’d mastered the art of invisibility. People saw her every day but they didn’t see her. She’d withdrawn the essence of herself years ago, tucked it under ball caps and dirty jeans and boob-squishing bras and silence. She’d wrapped it up tight and hidden it away, kept it only for herself. It was how people could see Willa’s eyes in Matty’s face — which was in all other respects identical to Diego’s — and not see the connection. They didn’t want to see the connection. They wanted to see only Diego in Matty — his talent, his charm, his limitless potential — so they did. Nobody wanted the Zincs to have anything to do with that beautiful boy’s bright future, so they simply didn’t see.

  And Willa was grateful. She didn’t want the Zincs to put their ugly fingerprints all over that beautiful boy, either.