Anton had the grace to look uncomfortable. “Don’t be such a hard-ass,” he said. “You shouldn’t stay here either, and you fucking know it. You of all people.”
“Yeah, right. Drive safely.”
“Do not, I repeat, do not get anywhere near Demi Vaughan,” Anton said.
“Get gone,” Eric said. “The look on your face is pissing me off.”
Anton lost no time. The big black Mercedes GLS bumped and bounced painfully hard over the washboard ruts as his brother accelerated around the curve.
His youngest brother knew better than to make eye contact when he came out of the house with his box of photos in his arms and his duffel bag slung over his shoulder.
Mace put his stuff into the back of his rented car. “I got a flight out of Portland tomorrow morning,” he said brusquely. “Back to Africa. Gonna be a long night. See you.”
Eric knew better than to ask what Mace was doing in Africa. His brother ran a small, specialized mercenary army and his services were in high demand, but the actual work he did was best not scrutinized too closely.
“Watch yourself out there,” he said gruffly.
“I always do, brother. You do the same. Stay safe. And hey. Fuck the Curse.”
“Yeah,” he replied. “Fuck the Curse.”
Mace got into his car. A rev of the motor, a grinding spray of gravel and mud, and Mace’s taillights retreated swiftly down the winding road and were lost to sight.
The wind was picking up, whipping the trees angrily.
Inside, wind howled mournfully in the eaves. The old house creaked and groaned. Wind rattled the square of cardboard Mace had duct-taped into the window frame in the door. Eric opened up the cases of electronic gear he’d brought with him, fired up his laptop and router, and sought the refuge of deep concentration. When it worked, it let him float in a tranquil place inside his own head. Dreaming up app design, coding, sifting data. Solving problems and anticipating new ones.
He liked his work as a tech entrepreneur. Otis hadn’t approved of their career choices, but Otis was a one-note guy when it came to vocation. If a job wasn’t in agriculture, construction, engineering, law enforcement or the military, for Otis it was parasitic white-collar bullshit. Doctors were exempt. Lawyers got an extra dose of scorn.
Mace’s work as a soldier-of-fortune was at least comprehensible, if a little too morally flexible for Otis’s comfort zone. But Anton’s DJ fame and his chain of decadent nightclubs had baffled Otis altogether. As had Erebus Inc., Eric’s app design company.
They all made spectacular money, which had helped to reconcile their adopted father. Even so, Otis had seen Eric’s business as frivolous and suspect. Selling smoke and mirrors, stuff with no substance. Who knew, maybe Otis was right, but Eric still liked what he’d created. More importantly, it kept him too busy to get in trouble.
Idle hands do the Devil’s work. Old Jeremiah used to say that whenever he found them loafing. Mostly during that last bad year, after the old man started tripping out on hellfire and pestilence. The hellfire theme had picked up a lot of steam after Mom died.
It got even worse after Redd Kimball showed up and started egging Jeremiah on.
That was when all the vaccinations started. Every day, they’d been forced to line up for a fresh injection from Kimball. A daily needle full of what-the-fuck. They’d felt like human pincushions.
He tried not to think about what might have been in those shots. The past was done and gone. They’d all survived this far.
GodsAcre had always been weird, but it had morphed into something dark and different after Redd Kimball showed up. It had been lonesome and boring up there for sure, even before, but running wild in the mountains with Mace and Anton had been good. He’d loved the hunting and fishing and swimming. He’d been four years old when Mom brought him there. Anton, five. Mace only two. He had no clear memories from before. GodsAcre had been his whole world.
After Mom died and Kimball showed up, the place had turned into a dystopian prison camp. Jeremiah’s rambling sermons had completely lost their thru-line. They’d turned into endless, incoherent rants against an amorphous, evil ‘them.’
And GodsAcre had started losing people fast right around then. They’d gone from well over a hundred people down to the final forty-one diehards, at the end.
The ones who got away before the fire were the lucky ones.
Then they’d saved Fiona in the nick of time after Jeremiah had agreed to let that prick Kimball marry her when she was only fifteen. He and Mace and Anton put a stop to that. Then the Curse came down, full force, and things got apocalyptic real fast.
Unwelcome memories flooded in on him. Fire and pain. Smoke and death. He knew why Mace and Anton wanted to run. They didn’t want to remember it either.
Jeremiah said that only the pure of heart would be spared the cleansing fire. Ironic that the three of them were the only survivors of the GodsAcre fire. There was nothing pure about them. Selfish, sinful, pleasure-loving sons-of-bitches, all three of them. Anton had named his chain of nightclubs ‘Hellbound,’ and Eric and Mace understood why.
Anything to prove that old madman wrong.
He paced around the place, twitchy and restless. Looked through his box of photos. Some were of birds and animals, some were of the three brothers. Otis’s favorite breed of wildlife, he used to joke. He stopped to stare at photo of Mace, naked to the waist, chopping wood. A red-tailed hawk. A spotted owl. Anton, diving into the swimming hole. A cougar prowling the length of a fallen log.
The loud, labored tick-tock of Otis’s grandfather clock was driving him nuts.
He didn’t want to think about the past. Ashes in the wind. It should stop haunting him. Fuck this.
He took his jacket off the hook. A hike over the ridge would get him to the highway that wound down that valley and into Shaw’s Crossing. There was a roadhouse bar there. The Hi-Way House. He’d go on foot. He knew the way, even in the dark. Jeremiah had insisted on teaching them to keep their bearings in the woods at night. Darkness, rain, snow, no adverse conditions were an excuse for getting lost. Not for the vanguard of the army of the righteous.
Besides, he planned to drink a fair amount of alcohol tonight. He never drove when he drank. And the Hi-Way House was no place to park his Porsche.
The walk would blow off excess energy. Sex would be better, but there was only one woman in the world that interested him right now, and she hated him with all the force of her being.
The Hi-Way House was a dump, but there would be tequila shots. Loud music. Maybe even some devolved, hairy biker types spoiling for a fight. There was an art to pissing people off and he wasn’t half bad at it when he applied himself.
Maybe he could provoke a big bunch of them all at once. Get a little workout. Drain some poison.
A guy could hope.
6
Be on your guard.
I believe in doing the right thing. Even when it hurts.
You broke the chains that bound you.
Eric’s words had been echoing through Demi’s mind all day. Now that she was home in her quiet townhouse with no interference, they bounced around in her mind like a freaking pinball machine. She didn’t know which of his outrageous statements to be pissed off about most. There were so many. Too much to process.
Do the right thing, hah. The balls on that guy. That he actually dared to say word one about the chains that bound her when he was the one who had forged them.
The truth about Eric had been hard to accept. She’d had to break the whole thing down into bite-sized pieces and force herself to swallow it one little bit at a time, and it had taken years to work through it all. Years.
To think that all that painstaking hard work and determination could be undone in an instant by a single smoldering glance. Damn that seductive, arrogant bastard.
His actions had made no sense to her at all seven years ago. She’d been so confused by what he’d done. She knew how smart, hardworking and ambitious
he was.
But stealing your girlfriend’s father’s trophy car, chugging booze in it, speeding on a narrow mountain highway with it, and running it off a cliff? That was stupid. Crazy.
There was no arguing with facts. It was a matter of public record. They’d fished Eric out of Kettle River more dead than alive. He’d been a few hundred feet down the steep slope of the canyon directly below Dad’s stolen, totaled Porsche, which had snagged on some trees on the hillside. He had alcohol in his system. He and the wrecked Porsche both stank of tequila.
Actions spoke louder than words. Eric’s actions had been one long, rage-filled yell.
The only way he could have gotten the keys to Dad’s Porsche was when she’d sneaked him into the Vaughan house seven years ago while her folks were gone on their weekend getaway. She’d invited him over for a hot secret tryst. She remembered the entire episode in exquisite sensual detail. Second by second. Kiss by kiss.
Then they had a big, ugly fight. She’d lost her temper and thrown him out.
He must have grabbed Dad’s Porsche keys off the pegboard in the kitchen as he went out the door, but she hadn’t seen him do it. She’d been too busy blubbering on the landing of the staircase, her feelings all hurt from their fight. Boo-hoo. Poor her.
Her mother had insisted that Eric had a brain development issue. A lack of impulse control, probably the result of the severe trauma in his past. It was tragic, and Mom was so sorry for him, but that didn’t excuse him from having to face the consequences of his actions. And ultimately, it was a blessing that Demi had seen who and what Eric Trask truly was before she got in too deep, right?
Right?
In the end, it was Demi who had paid for Eric’s fuck-up. Dad, ever the schemer, had swiftly figured out a way to use the situation to his advantage. He’d agreed to drop the charges against Eric—in exchange for full compliance in Demi’s career goals.
The conditions: She gave up the prized restaurant internship she’d won at Peccati Di Gola, the hottest new restaurant in Seattle. She gave up her plan to study at the Culinary Institute. She agreed to work hard and train for a leadership position in the family business, Shaw Paper Products. And she would never communicate with Eric Trask again for any reason. If she met those conditions, Eric walked free.
That part about not communicating with Eric wasn’t hard to comply with. She’d rather die than see that lying loser again. But the rest of it…well.
It had been hard to swallow.
In retrospect, she should have said no. From the very start. She should have said fuck you to all of them. Followed her dreams and never looked back. She should have left that idiot in jail to rot like he deserved. She would have been doing the world a favor.
But she couldn’t leave him in a cage. Not when she had the option of freeing him.
She’d caved, and she’d been angry at herself ever since.
Aw, crap. Enough already. Ancient history. No point thrashing it out again. She put on another dash of mascara, leaning toward the window to wipe a smear from under her eye. The Trask Effect was working its wicked sorcery on her even while Eric wasn’t physically in front of her. Just knowing he was out there somewhere made her body feel more female. It made her dress more seductively, walk with a sexier sway to her hips.
Look at this outfit she’d dug out of her wardrobe, for God’s sake. Tight, clingy shirt, a push-up bra, ass-flaunting jeans? What the fuck was that about? Her hair was even hanging loose. She never wore it like that these days. And she’d put on the highest-heeled boots she owned, just because her neck ached from looking up, up, up at Eric Trask.
She never dressed sexily in Shaw’s Crossing. Running a restaurant kept her too busy for a social life in any case, and for sleeping, too, for the most part. Besides, the dating pool around here was a shallow one, and she herself was a cynical, defensive, suspicious, uptight bitch when it came to men. Or so she’d been told, post-Eric. More than once.
A side-effect of always being on her guard. Bummer for her, but there it was.
Still, she was going out tonight. For air, alcohol and noise. Angry heavy metal live music would have suited her mood perfectly, but she wasn’t going to find any in Shaw’s Crossing. She’d have to make do with twangy country rock at the roadhouse.
The parking lot was unusually full at the Hi-Way House. Some popular local band was playing tonight. Demi shoved her way through the crowd to the bar, perched on a stool and yelled for a beer. The place smelled of booze and old frying grease. The live music that blared from the room with the stage sounded muddy and garbled. Someone had spilled tequila.
The smell unleashed vivid sense memories. Eric had brought tequila to their tryst that night. They’d done the whole ritual; salt, shot, lime. She’d never loved the heavy, bitter taste of that liquor, but once Eric Trask’s hot, demanding kiss tasted of it, well. It was all the tastes of life rolled into one. Bitter, salty, sour. The sweetness of his kiss. The burn of fire, the sting of danger, while his gorgeous body moved insistently inside her, driving her to explosive pleasure.
Oh yeah. After that night, she definitely ‘got’ tequila.
She hadn’t touched it since, and avoided any cocktail that contained it.
Demi sipped her beer and watched the dancers gyrating in flickering bluish light on the dance floor, wondering what the hell she’d hoped to accomplish by coming here.
Then the door opened and Eric Trask walked into the place, like an answer to her question.
Their gazes locked instantly. Click, like magnets coupling. Not even a split-instant’s chance to slip away unnoticed.
Just like that, it happened again. Energy raged through her body. Fireworks went off in her head. She couldn’t think, move, breathe or see anything but him.
Oh crap. She didn’t want this feeling. Make it stop.
He walked toward her. As luck would have it, the woman sitting on the bar stool next to her slid off and headed out onto the dance floor, giggling with her friends.
Eric approached, standing by the empty stool. His leather jacket was damp and cold and his hair was wet. He smelled like wind, rain, and himself.
“Looks like Fate,” he said. “You can’t seem to get away from me today.”
“You’re wrong,” Demi said. “I do whatever the fuck I want. Nobody forces me anymore. Not even Fate.”
“Good for you,” he said. “I’m going to sit down on this bar stool. Do whatever you want, but I’m really hoping that you won’t get up and walk away.”
She stared into his eyes. “One single word about that crazy shit you did today at my dad’s house, even one, and I’m gone. Like a shot.”
“Agreed,” he said. “Not a word. Like it never happened.”
He slid into place on the stool, angling his body toward hers.
“I didn’t expect to see you here tonight,” she said.
He had to lean close to hear her in the noise. Close enough so she could smell his shower soap and aftershave and the cold air clinging to his leather coat. “I’d say the same thing about you,” he said. “Doesn’t seem like your kind of place.”
“I don’t have a lot of choice in this town,” she said. “It was a long day. I wanted a drink and enough noise so I couldn’t hear myself think. I don’t like my thoughts right now.”
“Same for me. Until now.” Eric gave her a slow once-over that made her body tighten with hot sensual awareness, a sensation as intense as it was unwelcome. He beckoned to the bartender. “Tequila,” he called out. “Gran Patron Piedra. Two shots.”
The guy slapped two glasses down on the bar and filled them. He shoved over lime slices and a salt shaker.
Eric downed his first tequila shot swiftly, and pushed the other in her direction.
Demi looked down at it. Her heart sped up, loud in her ears despite the pounding music. After all these years, every detail of that episode in her bedroom was so intensely vivid in her mind. She wondered if he remembered it as clearly as she did.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” she said.
Eric studied her averted face. After a moment, he took the second shot and tossed it back himself. “Guess I deserved that.”
“Don’t,” she said sharply. “Don’t even lift the lid.”
She clutched the neck of her beer, white-knuckled, and took a sip, refusing to meet his eyes. Playing it oh, so very cool. She could care less. He was welcome to get up and walk away if he wanted. Screw it. She’d barely notice.
But then the silence got so long, it started to annoy her. “Oh, for God’s sake, Eric,” she finally snapped. “What is your damn problem?”
“I’m just trying to think of something to say to you that won’t lead into a danger zone,” he said. “And I’m coming up blank.”
“Well, think harder. And don’t make such a big goddamn thing out of it. I’m just any old high school classmate that you haven’t seen in years. You know. Where have you been? What have you done? Small talk. Chit chat. You can do it. I know you can.”
“Small talk? For real? Us?”
“Especially us,” she said.
He sighed. “Damn. I guess I can give it a shot.” He studied her face for another long moment. “So. Been a while.”
“Sure has,” she agreed.
“I never thought I’d see you settled here. I thought you’d get the hell out of this town. Like me.”
Demi sipped her beer as she considered her answer. “I did leave.”
“But not to cooking school. Isn’t that where you were headed?”
She shook her head. “I gave that up,” she said. “I ended up working for Shaw Paper Products for a few years. The center up in Spokane, like you heard.”
“So they finally got you. They wrestled you down.” He hesitated. “For a while, at least.”
“Yeah. I gave it my best shot, but I finally bailed. It’s not like it was a death sentence or anything. It just wasn’t my thing. After Mom died, I finally managed to make Granddad understand that my heart would never be in it.”
“And then you opened the restaurant? You went back to your original idea?”
Headlong: The Hellbound Brotherhood Book Two Page 6