5. Chapter 5
5
HER
“Y ou seem to be developing a Jesus Christ-like tendency to hurt your hands,” I scolded him, unwinding a length of gauze across his lacerated palms, which I’d already treated with antiseptic and aloe—probably in the wrong order, as my future in the medical profession continued to prove bright.
“Oh, is that what you’re going to start calling me now?” he asked. “Just when I was getting used to Albert Einstein.”
I groaned as I tried to use some dull scissors to clumsily snip off the end of the gauze. For a pre-med, I sure seemed to fuck up all my attempts to give medical treatment. “Yeah, that’s just what you need—to get it in your head that you’re not only a super-genius but the Messiah, too. Besides, weren’t you just telling me a few days ago that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible?”
“That does sound like something I would say,” he admitted. “But weren’t you the one who disagreed with me? Besides, science is more flexible than you think. Hell, even gravity breaks down at the quantum level.”
I hid a smile and ripped off another piece of gauze. “Oh, so you’re happy to defy the laws of science when it benefits you?”
“You know I’m happy to defy the laws of everything when it benefits me.”
Face to face, we straddled the thick cushions on the sand-colored chaise in an outdoor “room” nobody ever used, which was a shame for something so lovingly landscaped. Red terracotta pots and agave plants, plus a golden paloverde, provided just enough shade from a dusky autumn that had turned his eyes into twin coppery flames and his hair into liquid gold. And it almost matched the color scheme of the trucker-style college hat he’d playfully grabbed off my head and slapped over his sunny locks.
After greeting him, I’d dared to snatch us a stack of fresh-baked raspberry cheesecake bars from the kitchen, which he’d happily inhaled all but one of, despite the tricky relationship dynamics and despite the chance of the housekeeper inquiring why I was suddenly eating for three. I’d hoped to do more, honestly. Earlier, I’d browsed the campus bookstore, not quite bringing myself to admit what I was looking for and pushing aside the thought that he probably wouldn’t even accept it. Anyway, I’d given up in frustration. Why had nobody warned me how difficult it was to buy a gift for someone who wasn’t allowed to own anything?
However, when I’d stopped at a promotional table on campus to fill out a credit card application—mostly, I admitted, to get the fifty-dollar nail salon voucher they were offering—the hat had appeared as a bonus gift. In perhaps the least shocking revelation of the day, it looked much better on him.
“Keep it,” I’d said. “I don’t do hats. Not with this hair. But you know the brim goes in the front, right?”
Well, the effect was very “foreigner trying to look American,” but it didn’t matter when the light here seemed to want to make love to him. Hell, the light everywhere seemed to want to make love to him. I myself wanted to paint him, even though I hadn’t picked up a paintbrush since seventh-grade art class. The bright sunset colors contrasted with the soft white T-shirt that clung lovingly to his biceps the way his shirts always did no matter what size they happened to be. The worn-in pair of jeans he had thrown on, sitting low on his hips, was even more distracting. And it hadn’t been his idea to straddle the chaise, but I was glad we did, even if it meant I had to keep looking away from the space between his legs to keep from blushing crimson myself. And he knew it. Good God, of course he did.
Upon arriving home, I’d been instantly amazed by the freedom that came with having three fewer people in the house. For one, I could breathe, and for two, I could run immediately out to the garden, into the shelter of the velvet mesquite tree, and see him before anyone else, his eyes as hungry and relieved as if we’d been separated for years instead of hours. And then my fingers were arched over his powerful shoulders and his fingers were softly brushing across the back pockets of my denim shorts, and all the trials of the day seemed to melt into nothing much at all.
“Thank you,” I’d whispered, pressing a featherlight kiss to his lips. The exam results would show up soon enough. For now, nothing more needed to be asked or said.
In the meantime, his hair was still damp from the outdoor shower behind the shed, and I breathed him in, soap and rainwater and the desert itself, as if it had finally taken in this foreign boy as one of its own. But why, if I’d been tested that day—in more ways than one—was he holding on to me like it was the last chance he thought he’d ever get?
Then I saw the blood. Vermilion streaks trailing down his wrists like tears, and I immediately threw down the bags I was carrying and went for the first aid supplies. Shouldn’t I put my rudimentary medical skills to use helping the only person who was working as hard as I was to make sure I passed my course?
So far, he’d been an uncharacteristically quiet patient, watching as I clumsily struggled to unroll and wind the gauze. Whatever his mind was dwelling on, it was very far from the cuts on his palm.
And so was mine. I recalled how utterly deranged my ex-wannabe-boyfriend had sounded as he’d hurled abuse across a river of baffled students. I’d seen now that Corey was petty, jealous, vindictive, and cruel, but not, to my knowledge, dangerous. However, the proof that he could be was now staring up at me from the scabbed and bloody palm I held.
And why? Because Corey felt his rival had not only stolen—for lack of a less offensive term— me , but his job. But how? It wasn’t like Langer could fire Corey and replace him with a slave. But if Corey somehow thought he could, it didn’t matter. Booze-bloated wreck or not, Corey still had power over both of us. And as long as the world was what it was, it would stay that way.
But the boy in front of me, his forehead almost touching mine, already knew that.
“You need to be more careful,” I whispered, unwilling to let the mention of Corey ruin a moment I had been waiting all day for. “Not just about your hands, I mean. About everything.”
He looked down at his wounds, his eyes flicking back up to meet mine. “I know.”
I snipped off the end of the gauze and struggled to affix it in place, mostly succeeding in only taping my own fingers together. “Sorry, but I think it might be hard for you to hold a pen for a while.”
“After today, I might not have to,” he said. “It might be gardening from here on out.”
“Well, you are going to keep tutoring me, aren’t you?” I asked. “I still have the final and a whole second semester of o-chem ahead of me. Unless you think I’ll fail and Daddy will take it out on you, and—” My mind was going places it shouldn’t.
He looked at me seriously. “That is not going to happen.”
“Which one, me failing or—”
“Any of it,” he cut me off. “Don’t talk like that. Anyway, gardening isn’t a total waste of time. We got rid of the javelinas.”
I blinked. “Javelinas?”
He seemed startled as if afraid he’d gotten his facts wrong—for him, a fate worse than death, I suspected. “Javelinas? Wild pigs? That is a thing here, isn’t it? It wasn’t just some delusion my feverish brain conjured up while I was passing out from blood loss?”
“No, of course they’re a thing,” I reassured him. “I just didn’t realize that was what the fence was for. Those things are the stuff of nightmares, I swear. They have ridiculously sharp teeth and when we had our dog, they used to chase her out of the garden and she wouldn’t come back for days. And that’s on top of tearing up the yard and shitting everywhere.”
“The desert really is a magical place, isn’t it?” he remarked.
“I saw the fence,” I said amid a giggle. “You got all that done in one day?”
The fence, with all of its precise spacing and neat angles, had looked like more than the day’s work of one person. Even one who had been forced to learn a thing or two about building things over the years.
“No. Just some of the holes and wire,” he admitted. “Langer’s guys did everything else.”
My insides churned at the sound of the name of the man who seemed to have his hand in everything these days. “Langer’s guys? Why ?”
“Because he likes me,” he said, dropping his eyes and absently picking at the edge of the gauze. “Which I understand, naturally,” he remarked. “Or I could , if I liked him. But I don’t.”
“So what does he want with you?” No, Langer couldn’t hire him. But there was one thing he could do. My heart skipped. I almost couldn’t bring myself to speak the words. “Was Langer here? Did he say anything about—”
“No,” he said quickly, though I wasn’t exactly sure what question he was answering. I didn’t want to know. “Does—does he want to buy you?”
“No.”
At first, I relaxed just a bit when he said, “No.”
“Worse,” he continued. “I think he wants to adopt me.”
He was smiling somewhat, but my shock must still have been clear.
“Look, this is for me to worry about,” he said firmly. “Not you.”
Fuck. He was worried. That’s why he’d held me so tight. “Why am I never around when these things happen?” I demanded.
“Next time I’ll call you up in the middle of class,” he teased. “‘Help, I cut up my hands, come home and cuddle me.’”
“I didn’t mean the cuts. I meant Langer.”
“Doesn’t matter. The solution’s the same.”
I shook my head. “Of course it is because your definition of cuddling rarely ever means just cuddling.”
He stared down at the results of my treatment, such as it was. “Well, if it helps, this gauze is wrapped so tight, my repertoire will be limited,” he said. “Slightly.”
I gasped indignantly. “Well, I tried my—”
“Hey, relax. It was very sweet,” he said and gave me a forehead kiss for good measure, though he was already prying at the gauze, trying to loosen it. “I can’t remember the last time anyone went to that much effort to treat my injuries.” He looked up to see my exaggerated pout. “Cheer up. Maybe you can be one of those doctors who just look at X-rays and never have to actually interact with patients. Plus, you can still cuddle me,” he said, leaning back on the chaise, the hat making him passable as a frat boy on a spring break vacation. “You can cuddle my brains out if you want.”
I looked around frantically, turning back in horror. “Here?”
He smiled slyly, one arm casually behind his head. He wasn’t joking, of course. I should have known him well enough by now to know that he was never joking about such serious matters as wanton semi-public sex.
“What the hell happened to being more careful?” I demanded.
“You’re the one who told me nobody ever comes out here.”
And just like that, all my hard work on the gauze was for naught as he peeled it off and immediately dove for the bare skin between the hem of my crop top and tiny shorts, pulling me forward to encourage me to straddle him and push my pelvis deep into the thighs covered by that soft denim, melting bodily into the friction, feeling a soft moan bubble up from the same vicinity. And so my endless curls swung down like a curtain as I kissed the lips I had never stopped longing for even in the most desperate, fragile moments of my day, and I quivered while he kissed my eyes and cheeks and tongued along my jawline, trembled at the ghost of his thumb on the nipple that stiffened under my tight top. His fingers—surprisingly nimble despite their injuries, at least when they found an activity they enjoyed—slid teasingly up the soft skin of my thighs and started working on the buttons of my shorts.
At a sudden vibration, we both jumped, both more on edge than either of us wanted to admit.
“Oh shit,” he said as the phone slipped out of his pocket and onto the sandy ground next to the chaise. For a second before he swiped it up, we both looked down at it in shock, then up at each other.
He never carried his phone around. I’d never seen him with it since the day I gave it to him and had no idea where he kept it—I was happy enough to receive the occasional playful message, and out of courtesy, I didn’t ask questions. That didn’t mean I wasn’t wondering what was happening or where Maeve was. But every time I remembered the night I’d given it to him—and the argument that had almost destroyed what we now had before it even started—I chose not to. If he needed more help, surely he’d come to me. After all, he trusted me now. Right?
If I’d had even a moment to think, maybe I would have asked him. But a second later he was gone, and I was left sitting on the chaise, mystified and alone, in the shadow of the swaying paloverde, with my pussy naughtily soaking the fabric of my half-unbuttoned shorts and the pristine plush cushion beneath, not understanding just what the hell had just happened but aware that something was very wrong. Wronger than Corey; wronger even than whatever he suspected Langer of being up to.
Because I knew the number I’d seen flashing on the screen. And I knew there was only one place he could have gotten it.
HIM
Okay, two last calls. The house was emptier at the moment, but it was still a bitch to find someplace with decent reception and where I wouldn’t be seen, overheard, or suspected of being somewhere I shouldn’t be. The garden shed was pretty much the only place on the property that met those requirements, even before the gardener’s unceremonious shitcanning. So that’s where I went to take the call, knowing that any explanation I could possibly offer the wet, purring, half-undressed vision on the chaise would only make things worse, not better. Hell, I might need another shower—an icy cold one—before I was in any state to be traipsing through the garden, either.
The biggest tragedy of all was that I probably had mere minutes before the housekeeper tracked me down, started asking questions about the fence, and bombarded me with all the tasks she wanted me to do before she’d actually let me go to sleep. And then I’d have no chance to get back to Louisa that night.
That was until small, faint footsteps approached. Female footsteps.
I hastily apologized and ended the call. “Lou?”
I knew she’d recognized the number, and now she’d probably heard me talking. Talking with a woman I’d never met and only knew about because of her, whose handwritten number I’d swiped off her desk when she was out of the room, without ever telling her about any of it.
When I put it that way, it sounded so bad .
But still. I could handle this. I would have to come clean, but we could work through it.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t Louisa in the doorway. It was the household’s other girl.
“So your sister’s missing? That’s what this is about? How awful. Tell me more.”
“Goddammit.” I ran a hand through my hair in exasperation as I turned around. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t suspected something like this would happen. But why did it always have to happen at the worst possible time? “Why couldn’t the master have taken you to LA, too?”
The maid emerged into the murky light of the shed, sashaying as usual in those hip-hugging jeans, though I only saw the sadness and desperation behind it now. But you could be sad and desperate and still dangerous.
“You know, I asked myself that same question,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to see the ocean. But he didn’t, so I’m stuck here with a shitload of time on my hands, and you’re still in the hole from the last one.” She stepped closer, and my eyes followed as she traced a thin, pale finger along my jawline and cheek, trailing up to the edge of the hat that in my haste I hadn’t thought to remove, its brim still twisted to the side. She grabbed it off my head and stuck it on her own.
“So if you want me to stay quiet about all this, you’re really gonna have to make it worth my while.”