Eli looked around the blank and bare room. The way it had to be for his dad to keep any kind of equilibrium.
His ass was just going to have to stay numb.
“They also bring their own Thanksgiving dinner,” she said, nodding at the turkey and congealed gravy on the plastic plates from the cafeteria.
“Yeah, well, I’m not much of a cook.”
He was fully aware of how sad this scene was, sitting here with his unconscious father while Victoria, Jacob, and everyone else dined on Ruby’s no-doubt-delicious dinner.
Victoria had invited him, but he’d declined.
Things were getting complicated. The painting at the ranch was over, but Victoria and Jacob were still at his house. There was an unspoken agreement between them that it was okay for Jacob and Victoria to stay.
His silent house was full, all the time, with chatter and laughter and video game beeps and cell phones ringing. At night, Jacob had nightmares and Eli stood outside the door of that guest room listening to Victoria whisper to him, calming his scared, little-boy tears.
Last night Victoria had climbed into Eli’s bed and he knew it was because of the investment he’d made, the conversation they’d had a few days ago about his feelings.
Gratitude and something like pity had been in her eyes. Which had pissed him off.
He ran a hand over his neck, across his cheek, feeling the scrape of his beard. He was embarrassed by how he had used her. Flipping her onto her stomach so he didn’t have to look in her eyes. Putting his hand over her mouth when she started to scream, making her come until she begged him to stop.
Afterward she’d asked him again to come to Thanksgiving dinner with her family, and he’d told her to leave his room.
Not his finest hour.
“What about you?” he asked Caitlyn. “Working on Thanksgiving. Is someone keeping a plate warm for you?”
“I’m, ah … I’m back with Jimmy,” Caitlyn said, her smile shy but sweet. “He stopped drinking. We’re going over to his family’s place tonight.”
“That’s great,” Eli said, and she glanced up, clearly surprised by his earnestness. “I’m serious, you deserve some good stuff, Caitlyn. You really do.”
Those little dragons on her fingernails winked in the sunlight as if in agreement.
“What’s …” He pointed at her hands. “What’s the story with your nails?”
“Oh.” She laughed, curling her hands into fists in embarrassment. “My sister and I are taking some classes to get a part-time job. You know, nails and things. We’re trying to save a little money.”
Nails and things. Spa stuff.
“There a lot of jobs around here for that?” he asked.
“Not really,” she said. “We’d have to drive to Dallas.”
“You hear about what’s happening over at Crooked Creek?”
She laughed. “Everyone’s heard about it. A spa?”
“Go apply.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I haven’t even graduated. They probably want someone …”
“Just like you. Apply.”
She blinked at him, as if unsure of what to do with this version of him. As if some other animal had taken his place. God, he thought, had he been so bad to her?
The wariness on her face said it all.
The answer was yes. To her, he’d been awful.
“I’ll put in a word for you. A recommendation.”
“Okay,” she said, that smile coming back, the one that had drawn him to her in the first place. The smile that made her great at her job, that would make her great at the spa. “That’s great. Thanks.”
He nodded, and the two of them stayed in that room—more comfortable together than they’d ever been when they were involved.
“He’s awfully calm today,” Eli said, pointing to his father, who was sleeping quietly in the bed, his sheets and pajamas unruffled, so unlike the mess he usually made of things, thrashing around and swearing at people.
“He’s been doing great lately,” Caitlyn agreed. “Ever since Amy started coming around.”
The back of his head hit the wall behind him, and his brain splattered everywhere.
“Amy?” he whispered.
“Yeah.” Caitlyn continued as if she hadn’t totally gutted him. “Showed up a few weeks ago, saying she wanted to see what her money was buying.”
chapter
22
The oak-and-glass door of the Crooked Creek was paper under his fist—Eli practically tore through it, stepping into the foyer of the ranch like he was ready to take it down.
Tori came sliding to a halt outside the kitchen door. She was back to wearing her fancy, ugly clothes, a satiny purple shirt and black skirt. The smell of turkey and pie and happiness wafted out around her. “Christ, Eli, you scared the crap out of me.”
“Where the hell is she?” he demanded, and Victoria jumped. He was scaring her and he didn’t know how to stop it. This was a train with no brakes.
“Wh … who?”
“My mother!”
“I’m here.” Amy stepped in behind Victoria. She was dressed up, in a pair of gray slacks and a red shirt that clashed with her hair, all for Thanksgiving dinner. Victoria had told him she was invited, but it still burned to know that she was welcome here.
“You’ve been to visit my dad.”
Amy nodded, so composed. So together. He’d had a horse like her once that he had to put down because she had cancer in her mouth, and when he gave her the needle of succinylcholine, she looked him right in the eye. Full of pain and dying a terrible death, she had still been all defiance—she had practically dared him to do it.
And it had just about killed him.
“Yes. I’ve been to visit him five or six times now.”
“You have no right!”
“I have every right,” she countered. “I pay for that room in that place you put him.”
“No.” Eli shook his head. “No, that’s not true.”
“It sure is, Eli. Your Uncle John called me a few years ago and I’ve been paying ever since.”
It was as though the room had shrunk; the whole world was too small and he was totally disoriented. Claustrophobic. “Why … why would he lie?”
“You have to ask him.”
“But why are you paying?” None of this made sense—Uncle John lying to him, his mom forking over big money to care for the man she’d left.
“Because I shirked a lot of responsibilities when I left, Eli. I know you don’t think I know that, but I do. I wanted to make one thing right. John gave me that chance.”
“So you choose to pay for your husband’s nursing home?” He laughed. “That’s what you pick? Sending a check? Great job, Mom—way to own up to your mistakes.”
He couldn’t stand it anymore. He couldn’t be in this place one more second breathing the same air as her. Everything he swore he’d never feel again, everything he swore he’d never ask, was so close to the surface, right there for everyone to see.
He turned and left, walking out the front door. The sunlight was bright, the air cold; the trees were turning bright yellow and red, as if they were on fire, and none of it mattered.
“What can I do, Eli?” Amy followed him out onto the porch. “You want me to stop. I’ll stop—”
“I want you to—” He shook his head, doing everything he could to swallow the question. Everything he could to strangle the eight-year-old boy inside of him who was dying for answers.
A hand touched his back, full of static and electricity, and he knew it wasn’t Victoria, so he spun, knocking that hand away so hard it had to hurt. But Amy just stood there, looking at him.
“Ask me,” she whispered, as if she knew that the questions were burning the insides of his mouth.
“Why?”
“Because he was hurting me so bad it felt like I was dying.” The words tumbled out on a river of breath. “Because I knew if I stayed one more minute—”
“No.” Oh God, i
t hurt. It hurt so much. “Why didn’t you …?”
“Wh … what?”
“Why didn’t you take me with you?”
That shell around her cracked wide open and he could feel her pain, her incredulous agony. Her shoulders caved and for a moment, one breathless still moment, he wondered if she was going to fall at his feet. But then she lifted her watery green eyes. There was too much hurt in those eyes, just like that horse he’d had to put down. “It … it never occurred to me that you would want to go. I was moving to a one-bedroom apartment in the middle of the city. I couldn’t imagine taking you away from the land or the horses. How could I take you away from everything you loved, everything that made you who you were? I couldn’t imagine taking you from … from him. You were always … his. From the beginning, as a baby, you … you wanted to be with him, all the time. I’d hold you in my arms and you’d scream for him. You were your father’s son.”
“But you never tried.”
“I did. And I could have tried harder, I know. But your father got custody and he wouldn’t let me back on the land. I tried to get you to visit, honey—” She reached for him and he flinched away. She dropped that hand, clutching it in her other one as if holding it back. “Summers. Christmas. Your father …”
“Said no.” Of course he did. She’d left him.
“I imagined … that it was you saying no. That I’d hurt you so much, you were punishing me.”
He remembered one summer, cleaning out the stalls in the early June heat. His father coming into the barn and watching him for a long time. “You want to go see her?” he’d asked.
“Who?”
“Your mother.”
By then he’d been twelve. Uncle John was there. The land. His horse. The rock of his grudge. He’d shaken his head and his father had walked away. She was never brought up again.
“I admit that it got easier to let you go,” she whispered. “In my head. I told myself that you hated me. That you and your father—”
“Were barely surviving? That he was punishing me for everything you did? That my life was a total hell, because of you?”
He wished he didn’t see her pain, wished he was blind and dumb to it, but her agony was a force of nature, undeniable as it filled the yard, lifted the sky, pushed away clouds.
“I thought you’d both be happier with me gone. You were your father’s son.” Her voice cracked as a sob pushed through, but she swallowed it quickly, as though it never happened. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He stepped backwards, lifting his gaze until he saw the whole ranch.
The land that he’d loved because he had nothing else in his life to care for. He thought of his uncle, of a reckoning he didn’t know how to handle.
And he thought of his father. Locked in his hate. In the past. Frozen solid in a wall of grief and bitterness.
The sun was shining. How odd. But it wasn’t really just shining, it was falling to the earth in great beams, like those pictures on the front of church bulletins.
Like God was saying something.
Victoria stood on the porch, that purple blouse of hers gleaming like a gem. Her level, midnight eyes were on him and him alone. He could feel her worry about him. Her sympathy. He thought of the sex last night, how angry he’d been that she would turn away his feelings.
He was his father’s son. Punishing the woman he … loved. Oh hell, really? Loved. He pressed on all those feelings, gauging their depth and temperature, and all he knew was that he’d never felt this way before about a person. Never wanted so badly to share his life with someone. The good, the bad, the whatever.
And he’d punished her last night because she didn’t love him back.
His father’s son.
And he didn’t want to be anything like that man.
Under the power of some foreign motor, he crossed the lawn, walking right past his mother, who lifted her head to watch him go. He stopped at the bottom of the steps, staring up at Victoria.
She didn’t love him; he knew that. But she cared, and that was enough right now. That was more than he’d ever had. And he had to do this, if he was ever going to get rid of the lonely life his parents had saddled on his back.
“I love you.”
She gasped. Her eyes went wide and slowly filled with fear.
Pain sliced through him, sizzling along his veins, but he kept going, throwing off the weight he’d been carrying for so damn long. “I know that’s not what you want, but … I am not my father’s son. And … I love you.”
Looking at her silent freak-out was more than he could take so he turned and headed back to his truck.
Back to his home.
Alone.
She went at dusk, her headlights eating up the shadows, bouncing through the darkness. She was iron-clad, driving to his house. Utterly resolved.
This … affair had gone on long enough. What was supposed to be fun, just good old dirty fun, had turned into a mess.
Love? A wild arm of frenzied panic slipped through the cracks of her resolve. She batted it away. There would be no thinking about love. At the beginning, she had loved her husband and it had made her weak and blind, needy and ruined.
She pulled up to his house, surprised to see it dark. Happy, actually. Relieved that no one appeared to be home. She didn’t want to see him. Didn’t want to confront this love of his.
What. A. Coward.
Fine, she was a coward, but that didn’t change the fact that she hadn’t signed up for this. She’d signed up for kinky sex with an emotional cripple.
She didn’t want to be loved.
Carefully, she put her hand to her neck, feeling the wild thrumming of her heart. Everything in her was running at a staccato rhythm, hard and disjointed; she could barely put two thoughts together.
Before she totally chickened out, she opened her car door and quietly shut it. She hurried up the stairs, only to run right into his legs, stretched out in the shadows under the porch roof.
He sat tipped back in a chair, his hands clasped across his lean belly.
His eyes stripped her. Stripped her of clothes, of skin, of that damn resolve she needed.
Those eyes knew her inside and out.
And still loved her, she thought with what felt like wonder. With what felt like hope and longing.
“I’m getting our stuff,” she said, wishing she sounded stronger.
He nodded.
She didn’t wait. She practically ran inside, shoving Jacob’s video games and clothes into the bags she’d left open at the foot of the bed they’d been using. Toothbrushes, brushes, the little bit of makeup she still wore were scattered across his bathroom counter.
Messy, she thought, feeling fragmented, broken in about twenty different places. We’re so messy. We just made ourselves at home here. What a mistake.
Using her arms, she just swept the whole disaster into a bag and then swung it over her shoulder. If they left anything, it wasn’t important.
Why did she feel like crying? she wondered. Why did this hurt so much?
She stepped out onto the porch, where he hadn’t moved. He sat there staring out at his land, the dust and rocks and trees that had made up his life.
“I have everything.”
He didn’t say anything, and her nerves were stretched so thin. So tight.
Walk, she told herself. Just walk. Don’t say anything. Don’t try to make this better; you’ll only make it worse.
“You know,” she said, rejecting her own sound advice. He was slightly behind her and she stared at the worn toe of his boot, the silver dull in the moonlight. She felt his eyes on her back, the nape of her neck, that place he loved to bite. “You don’t really love me.”
“I don’t?”
“No. No. It’s just, you feel comfortable with me. You like me.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes. You’d feel this way about anyone you let into your life like this. You—”
The chair scraped against t
he wood and clattered to the ground. She jumped as she felt him behind her, so close his breath touched her neck, her cheek. He was so angry she could feel it coming off his body like heat. “Don’t sell yourself short, Tori,” he breathed.
“I’m … I’m not. I’m just, you know, trying …”
“I love you because you’re smart; because you’re tough. You’re the most game person I’ve ever met. You’re brave like no one I’ve ever known, and you try so damn hard all the time to be kind. You’re a good mother to that boy of yours. Makes me want to have a dozen kids with you, watch you love them all. You’re funny, even when you’re trying not to be. Underneath those ugly clothes you like to wear you’re a total pervert. You make me want to change the world for you. You make me want to forgive my mom, even when it’s impossible. You open me up, Tori. Christ, listen to me, I’ve never said so many words in a row in my life. You cracked me right down the middle. And I love you.”
Stars were coming out in the darkest part of the sky, an ancient compass leading the lost home. She blinked back tears, staring at those stars as hard as she could, looking for her way out of the darkness.
“And I know you’re scared. I know you’ve got plenty of reasons to be. I know you’ve got love all tangled up with need in your head. I know you don’t think you’re tough enough to know the difference between the two. But you are. Love won’t make you weak again, Tori. I don’t know if you really loved your husband, and I don’t know if he really loved you. But you have to know that I’d never hurt you like that. I’d never make you ashamed of anything you felt for me. I’d never leave you alone and defenseless and scared.”
Softly, barely, he touched her hair, and she flinched as if he’d held a knife to her throat. She heard him suck in his breath, wounded or surprised by her reaction. She didn’t know which, didn’t want to stick around to find out.
Down the stairs she flew, turning only when she felt the distance between them. Clutching her bags to her chest, she shook her head at him.
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