Chapter Ten #3
She cried out, and if the neighbors hadn’t realized she’d brought a man home, they did now.
The windows were single-pane, and they certainly weren’t soundproof. And if they had missed out, his own growl, deep, guttural
and one of absolute masculine pleasure, would have left them in no doubt.
She let her head fall back on the pillow, trying to regulate her breathing.
He moved away from her and went silently into the bathroom, getting rid of the condom before joining her back on the bed.
Normally, she would say something saucy. Just a little pithy remark to take advantage of the fact that a man who had just
experienced an orgasm was likely too undone to gain the upper hand. But she was too wrecked. Too rocked. Neither of them said
anything, and as the silence stretched over them, she felt a strange sensation expanding in her chest. And she did not . . .
care for it.
But she also couldn’t do anything about it. As the pressure built in her chest, she felt pressure building behind her eyes,
and she really did not care for that.
So she rolled over onto her back and didn’t look at him.
But then his large hand was tracing the same tattoo that he had just licked, and the touch was so different, so tender in
contrast, that her eyes began to sting.
“Tell me about this,” he said.
“I got drunk and did it on a whim,” she lied.
“Sheena,” he said. “We get one night.”
“Oh. Is this going to be an AMA? Or maybe it should be in an AITA.”
“I don’t know what either of those things means.”
“Ask me anything. Also am I the asshole?”
“Why are those . . . acronyms?”
“It’s a thing on the Internet. Wait a minute. You know trivia about Disneyland, but you don’t know that.”
“No. But maybe I’ll collect it to use if I ever go back to playing poker. I can distract somebody by throwing around nonsense
abbreviations.”
“It’s not nonsense. It’s very popular.”
“I can guess what an AMA is. But the other one . . .”
“People post situations and then ask strangers on the Internet if they are the asshole, or the other person.”
“Well, that sounds like everything could go wrong.”
“It kind of does.”
“I am certain in this scenario, I am the asshole,” he said. “So you should be the AMA.”
“That’s really not how it works.”
“I don’t actually care how it works. If I wanted to know, I would be on the Internet. Tell me about the tattoo.”
No one had ever asked. That was the thing. Not any of the men she had slept with since she had gotten it. Not her sisters,
even. Like people just assumed she had got it because it was decorative. Which was maybe fair, or maybe her sisters knew that
she wouldn’t want to tell them, because she was notoriously private about anything that could be classified as personal. Maybe
the fact that she was that sort of distant from everybody was just her own fault.
But he was right. It was just one night. And he was asking. Why not tell him?
“You know what vinca is, right?”
“Yes. It’s a pain in the ass.”
She loved that he knew. “Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”
He traced the lines of it. “No matter what, you can’t get rid of it.”
“Nope.”
“I like it.”
“My turn. Tell me about the professional poker playing. You know that’s the thing that made everybody assume that you were
actually just like your dad deep down.”
He shook his head slowly. “Yeah. But I never really understood why. My dad never gambled with his own money. He encouraged
other people to gamble with theirs. And with their lives.”
“That is true,” she said.
She felt so secluded with him in this little bubble. In this moment in time.
“And it felt good sometimes. To get away from here, while I was still . . . doing something for the ranch. For everybody.
But on my own terms. It’s . . .” He looked at her, and his gaze felt like a collision. “I believed in my dad. I did everything
that he told me to do. Your father being killed, that was a wake-up call. It was bullshit, Sheena. All of it. He said that
we were the good guys. That other people made bad decisions with their money and that wasn’t our fault. We were making sure
the people held up their end of the deal.”
Hearing him say that did something so strange to her heart. She had never really thought about why Denver had worked with
his dad. Or why he had changed afterward. She just had never thought of him as a whole person.
He had been symbolic of something, and that had been fine. Good enough.
“I believed in him. That was the worst part. To have to face the fact that I had been so profoundly wrong about the whole world. It was like looking at something upside down for your whole life, and then finding out your perspective was all wrong. Backward. He painted us as the victim sometimes. We were the people that were being cheated. I believed it. I can never forgive myself for that.” He looked up, his eyes focused on the ceiling.
“I realized that I was good at gambling. I learned a lot from watching people play games that my dad put together. And it . . . I dunno, it felt like healing. Or maybe like revenge in a small way. I gambled with his money. I won a lot of it. I’m way richer than my dad ever was, or ever will be.
And the only person risking anything is me.
I’m not going to say that I’m proud of everything that I did, or that it makes me a good person. But I . . .”
“Life sets you up in a certain way,” she said, yet again feeling that deep, undeniable kinship with him. “Sometimes I think
you can only be so good given how you started out.”
“Exactly.”
She sighed. She turned over to her side and looked at him. She felt safer in here with him. In the quiet of this room, in
this house where she had once been small and scared.
She had never brought a man back here before. What had she been thinking?
But it had happened. And there was nothing to be done about it now. It was like a moment out of time. A cone of silence and
safety. He had told her that, about himself, about his dad. He understood the tattoo.
“My dad never tried to justify what he did. He just . . . He made good money working for your dad, and that was that. The
end justified the means. He could give us things, and that was all that mattered. But he always said . . . he always said
that protecting us was the most important thing. But he didn’t. He left us alone, and he . . .”
She didn’t want to talk about this. She really didn’t. There was no point bringing it into this conversation. Into this moment.
“Do you want to know why I learned how to throw knives and axes?”
She had never told anyone this. Not anyone.
“Why?” he asked, his voice sounding dry.
“There was a guy. A man. He worked with your father, and with mine. He used to come around here all the time and drink. Hang out with my dad. He
started coming by sometimes if my dad wasn’t around. My dad . . . He always told me that . . . that we were important to him.”
Her chest felt pinched. Hurt. She hated this. She hated this memory. Because it was tied up in this vision of her dad that
she had once had that she had never been able to have again after.
One that she liked to pretend she had never had.
Because it was one thing to acknowledge all of his failures. But it was quite another to remember what it had been like to
love him.
What it had been like to believe him.
“I told him. I told him that I might be uncomfortable. I said I had a bad feeling about the way that Tim was when he was around,
and my dad said I had to trust him. That he would never let anything happen to me.”
Denver shifted, going up on his elbow, looking at her fiercely. But he didn’t interrupt her; he didn’t push her. Didn’t ask
her any questions. He simply let her talk.
“One time, he came up when my dad wasn’t there. He tried to kiss me. I pushed him away. He grabbed hold of me and he told
me that I was going to give him what he wanted. And that my dad wouldn’t believe me, because they were best friends. And anyway,
because he worked for Elias and so did my dad, he wouldn’t do anything.”
She gritted her teeth. “It right then I believed him. Not because I thought he was telling a deep truth. But because I had told my dad. I told him. I knew . . . he didn’t do anything.
He still let him come around. He didn’t listen to me.
He didn’t . . . believe me, or something.
I don’t know. But he let him come up there, and he felt emboldened to try to . . .
“He pushed me into my bedroom, and . . . I had a knife in there. I had one under my pillow, because the thing is, there were
always men coming and going, and things happening, and I didn’t trust anything. I never did. It was a paring knife, I grabbed
it and I stabbed him in the shoulder. I held onto it as hard as I could, because he tried to take it from me, and somehow . . .
I don’t remember all of it, we ended up outside. I was trying to stab him again, so he finally started to run. There was an
axe buried in the top of a log out there. I grabbed it, and I threw it at him. It hit the tree right next to him. I told him
that if he ever came back he was going to find it buried between his shoulder blades. Because I didn’t need my dad to protect
me. And I didn’t give a shit about Elias King. I told him I protect myself, and my sisters. He ever came up there again . . .
If he came up there again I’d use that knife to cut off his dick. And then I’d kill him.”
She was breathing hard, her whole body trembling. It was just such a . . . The memory itself in some ways made her feel powerful.
Because she had won. For herself. But it also made her feel weak and sad, because it had been the moment when she had truly
understood that she was on her own. So when her dad died a couple of months later, she knew it didn’t matter. Not really.
Because everything he’d ever said about protecting her had been a lie. That was it. He didn’t matter. Not at all. Without
him there, men wouldn’t come up anymore.
Thankfully, they had their dog after that. She had thought a good guard dog was necessary.
And right then she wanted to cry. Because the dog was gone. And not for any other reason really. She really missed that dog.
Denver sat up, covered his mouth with his hand. Then he looked down at her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
It wasn’t like the way people said it when they didn’t know what else to say, and it was just a gesture. It wasn’t like when
somebody was apologizing for something they had nothing to do with.
Because she could feel the weight of how responsible he felt.
“Don’t,” she said. “It’s not your fault.”
“I know that. I do. But I was in that same . . . that same circle of bastards, and somebody should be sorry, and we all know
that they never will be.”
It was just the most perfect thing. Because he was right. The only thing any of them were ever sorry for was getting caught,
having to be accountable.
Denver lived accountable. It was all he was.
She sat up too, and put her hand on his shoulder. “We have one night, Denver. It doesn’t need to be all about all those skeletons
we have buried in the backyard.”
“Do you have a skeleton buried in the backyard? I would support it.”
She smiled, and rested her forehead against his shoulder. “No. Because he never came back. Because I wasn’t kidding. And he
knew it.”
“You’re a hell of a woman, Sheena Patrick.”
It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her.