by K. A. Tucker
“It’s great. She’s been very kind to me.” I begin rearranging the jewelry rack to make room for the new bracelets.
I guess Chuck gets the hint. “So, Dakota . . . you called about a problem with your stereo system?”
Dakota throws her hands in the air. “Please! It just stopped working one day and this silence is driving me insane!” She leads him back through the beaded curtain, giving him a chance to do a once-over, his gaze lingering on her ass.
“No wonder it quit. How old is this thing?” I hear Chuck exclaim from the cramped storage room/office. The stereo system hasn’t been working since I started here. Neither has the security camera, which Dakota says is just a dummy anyway, to scare off thieving thirteen-year-olds.
The bell jangles over the door and Amber walks in with a quilt folded over her arm. “Hey! Why aren’t you sleeping?” I ask. Amber’s been working a stretch of night shifts. Her red Mini usually pulls into the Welleses’ driveway around the same time that I’m filling the horse trough with grain and fresh water each morning.
“I picked up a day shift tomorrow, so I need to stay up until tonight.” She hands me the quilt.
I shake my head. “I don’t know how you do it, Amber.”
“Reminding myself that I’m going to be traveling the world next year with ease. That’s how I do it.” She hands me the quilt—the blue-and-green one Ginny’s been working on all week. “Ginny said to put it in the display window.”
I can’t help but smile. The woman doesn’t own this shop, but she acts like she does. I lay the quilt out over the table of wool blankets. The token tree is there, as always, with gold and green fields stretching into the horizon.
It’s just like all the others—except this one has two tiny horses in the far distance, one black, one brown.
Amber digs into her pocket and pulls out a piece of paper. “The artist sent this with me. You forgot the grocery list on the porch.”
“Let me guess . . .” Sure enough, the same three things top the list. “When will she stop doing this!”
“When she’s six feet in the ground, and knowing Ginny, that won’t be for another fifty years.”
After two weeks straight of dried-out chicken legs, mealy instant potatoes, and beans from a can, I politely offered to cook dinner one night, as a thank-you to her. I wasn’t even sure I knew how to cook, but I figured it was worth a shot.
Ginny grumbled but then relented—admitting that she hated cooking—and I set out, borrowing a cookbook from Meredith, getting ingredients for a beef stew that looked easy enough and using my ’70s kitchenette for the very first time.
I may not remember ever cooking, but it turns out I’m pretty good at it. By Ginny’s second helping, she agreed.
I suffered through a few more days of “Ginny’s Classic” and then, when it was time for Meredith to go grocery shopping, I insisted on doing it. Ginny gave me two folded twenty-dollar bills and a grocery list with three items: two pounds of chicken thighs, five boxes of instant mashed potatoes, and seven 14-ounce cans of Heinz baked beans in tomato sauce.
I humored her by picking them up, but I also used my first paycheck to grab ingredients for several recipes I wanted to try. When I dropped her groceries off at her doorstep that day, I asked if I could cook again that night.
That was almost three weeks ago. We’ve since fallen into this routine where she hands me a list on Thursday night and I go grocery shopping on Friday after work. In that time, I’ve happily cooked every night and brought the dishes down to her front porch. And yet she still gives me a list with chicken, potatoes, and beans, even though I’ve now stopped buying them.
Amber glances at her watch. “I’ve gotta go. I have a hair appointment.”
“So, movie this weekend, right?” We try to go for coffee or out to a movie at the Bend theater at least once a week, if her crazy work hours permit it. She even took me horseback riding on Felix the Brown a few times.
“No, better.” Her eyes lights up. “A couple of my girlfriends are coming back into town for the Memorial Day long weekend. We’ll all go out, okay?”
“Maybe? I guess?” The same nervous blip of excitement and trepidation stirs inside me as it does every time I’m around new people. Which is everyone.
She reaches out and squeezes my shoulder, a gesture that she’s obviously learned from her mother. “It’ll be fine. I promise.”
A sudden blast of rock music spills out of the speakers and we both jump.
“Have fun,” Amber whispers wryly and heads quickly out the door.
Dakota pushes through the bead curtain a few moments later. “So are you going to charge me seventy-five dollars for being stupid, Chuck?”
“Lucky for you this is a small town and I’m related to my boss. I’ll see what I can do about waiving the fee. Just make sure you check the plugs next time, okay, Dakota?”
She salutes him, her face a picture of chagrin.
“And tell Ginny that the Fanshaws say hi,” he says to me as he walks past, throwing me another wink before passing through the door. I guess he’s a winky kind of guy.
“Oh, wow! How’d this get here?” Dakota traces the edge of the black horse on the new quilt with her finger.
“Amber Welles.”
“Hmmm . . . sheriff’s daughter, right? I remember her.” Dakota’s even tone and calm demeanor don’t give much away. “She was one of the popular girls. Honor roll. Rodeo Queen. Really into sports. On all the school councils, running all the dances. You know the kind, right?”
“Right,” I lie, pulling down the other display quilt. Rodeo Queen? I haven’t heard about that.
“Some of her friends were a bit much, though. Very self-absorbed. A few ranch princesses, too. They’re a nice family, though, aren’t they? The Welleses, I mean.”
“Yeah.” I can’t explain just how nice they are without divulging information I don’t care to share, even with someone as seemingly harmless as Dakota. So I simply say, “They’re great.”
“Have you met her brother?”
“Jesse? Yeah. Well, not really. I’ve met him, but he hasn’t been around much.” Actually, I haven’t seen Jesse since the middle of April, when he waved at me and then peeled out of the driveway. Every weekend, when I wake up and go down to feed and groom the Felixes, I check the garage next door, tucked in amongst the trees. He’s never there.
“He’s cute, that one. Looks like his daddy.”
“He is,” I agree. Except, when I hear “cute,” I think of Felix’s kittens bounding after their mother, their hinds tipping and spilling because they haven’t grown into their feet. But Jesse, with his dark eyes, his strong jaw, the way his body moves . . .
Jesse is gorgeous.
I think somewhere deep inside, I knew that the first moment I saw him.
“What a troublemaker, though.”
“I keep hearing that. What do you know about him?” I ask casually.
“Oh, you know how it is. The smaller the town, the bigger the mouths. I don’t know what’s true and what’s rumor. Being the sheriff’s son, people loved talking about him and he seemed to love giving people something to talk about.” She takes a sip of her coffee and waves at Ms. Milliken, the florist from down the street, her eyes glazing over slightly.
“Dakota?”
“Hmm?” She turns to look at me. “Oh, right. Jesse. Well, he used to hang out with these two hooligans—Ian and Dirk—and everyone knew them as a trio of trouble. Anytime something happened in town, you could guarantee that those three were involved. But . . . Jesse always seemed different from those two. They were loud and obnoxious and . . . rude. Jesse wasn’t. He was just there, usually hanging back, more cool and composed.” She pauses to take a gulp of her coffee. Dakota drinks her coffee fast. “So when Tommy Myers was stabbed at that party—”
“What?” Stabbed?
Dakota nods. “Yeah, that was a big deal for this town. I don’t know exactly what happened, but there was this house party
and Tommy got stabbed on the street after a fight. Sheriff Welles threw Ian, Dirk, and Jesse behind bars. Ian and Dirk said it was Jesse who stabbed Tommy. There were no other witnesses except them, and Tommy was in a coma.”
Jesse stabbed someone? “What about fingerprints?”
“It was winter. They all had gloves on. But Tommy survived. Whatever he told the sheriff got Jesse off and put Ian and Dirk in jail, like the dirt bags they are.”
My face twists with horror.
“I know, right? Tommy’s fine now. Living in Bend and married, the last I heard. Likes to show his scars at parties.” Her eyes flicker to the side of my face. I quickly turn to the window display, setting the old quilt gently on the floor.
“What a mess, though. Jesse’s father almost lost the next election, and everyone knew it was because of that whole fiasco with his son. I can’t imagine it was easy for Jesse being at home after that.”
I think I now know why he stays in that apartment above the attic.
“It could just be coincidence, but my uncle’s neighbor’s friend owns a security company and he said that Ginny had bars put up on her windows not long after. Apparently, she didn’t feel safe with Jesse living next door, even out there in the middle of nowhere.”
I sigh. So this is how rumors spread in a small town.
“I think I slept with him at a party.”
What? My jaw drops and my stomach begins to churn. “You think you slept with Jesse Welles?”
Dakota cocks her head. “What? No! Chuck.” She points out the window. There’s Chuck, leaving Poppa’s Diner across the street.
Relief swells in my chest. But why do I care who Jesse may have slept with?
“In fact, I’m pretty sure I did. My junior year? Or maybe sophomore?” Amber suggested that the “Dakota stories” extended beyond laced brownies and five-leafed plants in her backyard and into the beds of many guys, both in high school and older, both married and not. Dakota has called herself a “free spirit” on more than one occasion, so this shouldn’t surprise me.
It certainly doesn’t sway me. I still like her. Plus, who am I to judge? Maybe I was a “free spirit” too. Thanks to the baby that I lost, I know that I wasn’t a virgin when I was attacked, though I may as well be for all I remember. And given that no one seems to be looking for me, I must not have been in a relationship. But who have I slept with? Just the father of my child? Was there anyone else before him?
“Water? Are you okay?”
I realize that I’m standing in the window like a mannequin, and two elderly ladies are staring at me. “Yeah. Fine.” With a brief wave to them, I pick the quilt up off the floor. “So what was wrong with the stereo?”
“Oh! It was unplugged. I must have bumped it somehow.” She disappears behind the curtain once again to begin flipping through the stations. “So, what kind of music do you like?”
I frown. “I don’t know.” There aren’t any radios at Ginny’s. She prefers complete silence and curses Sheriff Gabe when she can hear country music playing from his car. Meredith always has talk radio on. Amber likes pop music. I heard alternative rock coming from the garage when Jesse was there. If I had to pick, I’d probably go with that.
Dakota’s head pokes out from around the beaded curtain. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
I smile. “I’m easy. Pick whatever you want.”
“Good. Call me weird, but I’m really digging trance lately.” A hypnotizing electronic sound pumps through the speakers.
It slides down my spine like a cold, wet finger.
And now I know what kind of music I definitely don’t like. Not at all.
NINETEEN
Jesse
then
“Welles!”
I peer out from the engine I’ve been buried in all afternoon to see Miller approaching me. “Mr. Petrova wants you at his house.”
My face screws up. “What for?” I left him a full-page list on Saturday night. I’m guessing some of that stuff will take weeks to get in.
Shit.
Did Alex come clean with him? A guy like Viktor would probably beat the hell out of her and then come after me.
I get no answer from Miller. Slipping my phone out of my pocket, I tap out a text to Alex, leaving greasy fingerprints on the screen.
V wants me to come over tonight. Do you know if he got parts?
I don’t want to put much more in writing, in case Viktor ever snoops through her phone. I drop it into my breast pocket and stare at the engine I’ve been working on, wondering if I need to be worried, while I wait.
Ten minutes later, my phone vibrates. I hold my breath.
Some boxes arrived today and he had them dropped in the garage.
“Thank fucking God,” I mutter, hanging my head, my chest suddenly lighter. It shouldn’t surprise me that the guy can get impossible-to-find, incredibly rare parts in less than forty-eight hours.
A second text comes in a moment later:
I won’t ever say anything. I promise.
Guilt swells for doubting her. I answer:
I’ll see you tonight, I guess?
It’s a full minute before I get a response.
I can’t ever do that again. I was hurt and wanted to do something hurtful. It was wrong.
I sigh and type out:
I know. It’s okay.
It’s not okay. Because it’s only been seven hours since I left the hotel and I miss her. Because I already want her again. And because I want to believe that what happened between Alex and me was more than simply her getting even.
The Shelby sits in front of the garage when I pull up to Viktor and Alex’s house.
“Jesse!” he exclaims, waving at me from the walkway. It’s so unlike him, I wonder if he’s drunk on a Monday at six p.m. “I am glad Miller gave you my message.”
“So you got the parts already?”
He smiles. A snakelike look. “Connections, my friend.”
I’m not his friend, but what the fuck ever. The sooner I’m done with this job, the better.
“I am waiting on a few more, but you should have plenty to get started on. Now, if you will please excuse me, it is time for me to enjoy one of my babies. It has been too long since I have taken her out.” He cracks open the front door and bellows, “Alexandria!” Shutting it, he strolls toward me. “My wife hates going for rides with me. She complains that I drive too fast. It scares her.” He climbs into the Shelby and cranks the engine, the sound of it coming to life a thing of sheer beauty.
I’m in the garage when I hear the front door close and the clicking of heels on concrete. Moments later, she appears in a cotton-candy pink coat, black pants, and ridiculously high shoes. Just the sight of her back gets my blood roiling, because I know what she looks like, what she feels like, what her skin smells like, under all that.
“Hurry up, Alexandria!” Viktor barks and her heels immediately click faster, until she’s practically running. That’s probably why she drops her keys. She stoops to pick them up.
And her fat bottom lip stares at me. She tried to cover it with makeup, but it may as well have a spotlight on it.
I walk to the Aston Martin, gritting my teeth as rage boils inside me, ready to take a wrench to the car. I don’t know how she got it, I remind myself. But I do know that she didn’t have it when I left her in bed this morning.
She’ll probably lie to me anyway. Tell me she walked into a wall or something.
And regardless, I can’t say a damn thing. It would probably only earn her a few more punches and cause me some definite problems. For one, I could kiss my job goodbye, given Viktor’s close connections with Rust. I’d also lose any chance of getting paid for the work I’ve done so far, not to mention my Barracuda.
But I don’t really care about me right now.
A door slams and then the Shelby peels out of the driveway. An angry horn blast at the bottom makes me think Viktor probably cut someone off as he jumped onto the road.
I
f Alex doesn’t like his driving, she’s probably terrified right now.
“Fuck!” I throw the wrench against the concrete floor.
Why do you have a fat lip?
Viktor and Alex came racing back up the driveway about an hour later, Alex’s face as white as a blank page of paper. She ducked her head and ran inside. I didn’t see her again to ask, but I have to know. Even if she gives me a lame answer.
I’m beginning to think she’s asleep when my phone dings.
I let my phone die last night and Viktor couldn’t get ahold of me.
“You’ve got to be . . .” I want to launch my phone at the wall. Instead, I type out:
He was worried about you so he hit you?
No. He wanted his pinstripe suit laid out for a breakfast meeting and he expected his wife to be home to do it for him.
A second text comes through quickly after:
You can’t say anything, Jesse. It won’t end well for either of us.
Tossing my phone on the far end of the bed, I storm across the room, pushing Boone’s door open. “Do you know that the fucker beats his wife?”
Boone, on the floor in nothing but shorts, pauses mid-crunch. He never misses his daily workout, even on days when he hits the gym. I’ve seen him come home from the bar annihilated and drop for a hundred reps. “Who?”
“Your man crush, Viktor Fuckhead Petrova.”
He flops to the floor and reaches back to give Licks a belly rub. By the muscles straining against his abdomen, I’d say Boone’s already done most of his reps for tonight. “Are you surprised? You saw him slap her at the bar.”
“So . . . what? You think it’s okay?”
“Of course I don’t, but what the hell am I supposed to do?” He scowls at me.
“You should have seen her lip tonight.”
Boone just stares at me.
I throw my hands in the air. “What?”
“Nothin’, man—I’ve just never seen you get heated about anyone before. You usually don’t give a fuck.” He starts in on his crunches again. “Why doesn’t she leave him?”
“She’s twenty-two, Boone. She thinks she’s trapped.”