Chapter 10
The cat had claimed the bed.
She lay curled in the center of the mattress like she'd paid rent, one ear swiveled toward me while I stood at the sink running cold water over my knuckles.
The blood had dried in the creases, and it took work to get it out, scrubbing with my thumbnail until the water ran clear.
My face looked like shit. Both eyes bruised, nose swollen, a cut along the bridge where the guy's ring had caught me.
I looked like I'd picked a fight with the ground, and the ground had won.
I turned off the water and dried my hands on the towel hanging from the nail by the stove.
The casita was one room and a bathroom, which was generous language for a shower stall and a toilet behind a door that stuck.
Everything I owned fit in here and didn't crowd it.
The bed sat against the west wall, the stove in the corner, one chair between them.
I pulled my shirt over my head and tossed it onto the chair. My ribs ached where I'd hit the ground in the parking lot. The bruise would show by morning. I unbuckled my belt and got my jeans off and stood in my boxers in the middle of my own house and tried to figure out what came next.
Rex's guy had threatened the ranch. I needed to tell Rafe, but Rafe was asleep, and the information would keep until morning.
What wouldn't keep was the look on Winston's face when I'd pulled away from him on the side of the highway.
I couldn't stop thinking about how he'd stood there with his hands raised after I'd stepped back, like he was the one who'd done something wrong.
He hadn't done anything wrong. He'd just refused to answer a question I needed answered before I could let him any closer.
The cat stretched and yawned and showed me her teeth.
"Nobody asked you," I said.
She closed her eyes.
I was reaching for the lamp when someone knocked.
I pulled on my jeans but left them unbuttoned and crossed to the door. I unlatched it and pulled it open.
Winston stood on my step with his hat held against his chest and a fistful of flowers in his other hand. Yellow ones, the kind Sierra kept in a clay pot on the kitchen table. In fact, they looked exactly like the flowers Sierra kept on the table.
I stared at the flowers long enough that a petal came loose and landed on my doorstep.
"You gonna shoot me or let me in?" he asked.
I stepped aside.
He came through the door, and the casita shrank by half.
Winston was a big man, and I kept forgetting that because he carried himself loose, easy, like the space he took up was borrowed and he'd give it right back.
In the casita there was nowhere to give it back to.
He stood in the center of the room with the flowers in one hand and his hat in the other and turned a slow circle, taking in the bed, the chair, the stove, the photo on the nightstand.
His eyes stayed on the photo a beat too long.
"You want a drink?" I asked.
"Sure."
I opened the cabinet above the stove. One tin plate, a fork, a hunting knife, and the flask. I pulled it down and unscrewed the cap, and held it out. He took it, his fingers brushing mine on the metal, and drank. He swallowed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and passed it back.
I drank. The whiskey was cheap and burned all the way down. I welcomed it because it gave me something to focus on besides the fact that Winston Valverde was standing in my bedroom holding stolen flowers and I was barefoot with my jeans undone.
"You can sit," I said. "Chair's the only option."
He picked my shirt up from the chair, folded it once, set it on the bed beside the cat, and sat down. The cat opened one eye, assessed him, and closed it again.
Winston set his hat on his knee and held out the flowers. "These are for you," he said.
"I see that."
"Sierra had them on the table. Seemed like the thing to do." He turned them in his hand. "I don't actually know if you're the kind of man who wants flowers. Seemed like a gamble worth taking."
"I'm not."
"Too late." He held them out.
I didn't take them.
"You stole flowers off Sierra's kitchen table."
"I borrowed them with the intent to deliver."
"You stole them."
"He had a whole pot. He won't miss six." Winston paused. "Five. One didn't make it."
"Jesus Christ."
"You want them or not?"
I took them because he was sitting in my only chair, looking at me like he'd rehearsed this part on the walk over, and it still wasn't going the way he'd planned. The stems were damp. A few petals had come loose and stuck to his palm.
I turned and set them on the nightstand next to Chance's photo. They looked wrong there, bright and alive next to my brother's frozen grin.
"You said to come find you," Winston said behind me. "When I was ready to tell the truth."
I turned around and leaned against the nightstand with my arms crossed over my bare chest. "That's what I said."
"Well." He rubbed his palms on his thighs. "I'm here."
I waited. Waiting was the one thing I was better at than him.
"Rex Rawlins isn't his real name," Winston said.
I waited.
"He operated in Texas fifteen years ago. Different name. Same kind of outfit. Horses, land, the right people in the right offices." He turned the flask. "Same kind of work, too. Broke men the way he broke animals. When the law caught up, he —"
He stopped.
"Took the fall the way men like him take falls."
"Meaning he didn't."
He looked up. "Meaning my daddy did. Five years in Young County."
The room went quiet except for the cat purring on the bed.
"He did the five and came home and..." Winston rubbed his thumb along the edge of the flask. "I had a whole way I was going to tell you this part. Practiced it on the drive up."
He shrugged.
I didn't say anything.
"He drank. Drank until his liver quit. Three months ago.
" His jaw worked. "Rex came across the state line.
New name. Bought himself a dinner theater.
Bought half the politicians in this county before anybody noticed.
My captain doesn't know I'm here. There's no case file.
No authorization." He set the flask on the floor between his boots, slowly, like he was afraid of dropping it.
"I crossed state lines on my own time and my own gas money to find the man who killed my daddy. "
"So you're not here for justice."
"Vengeance is justice of a sort," he said, looking at me. "That's it. That's the whole thing. I came up here to kill the man who ruined my father."
I believed him.
"Your turn," he said.
"My turn?"
"On the highway, you asked me why I was here. I just told you." He looked up. "Now I'm asking you something. In the desert, when you took me to Coyote. Were you going to kill me?"
The answer sat in my chest like a coal.
"I don't know," I said, and I meant it. "I think I wanted you dead."
He didn't flinch. He just looked at me, steady, waiting for the rest.
I sighed. "But I didn't know if I could do it. I didn't know if I should do it. Rafe is…" I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. "Look, it's not personal. It's what I do. That's what Rafe built me to do. Someone threatens this place, I make them gone." I held his eyes. "You were a threat, but…"
"Were you unsure before or after I got on my knees for you?"
"Before," I admitted. "But don't let it go to your head. It was the boots that made me hesitate. Not your pretty face, Ranger."
The cat jumped off the bed, padded to the door, and scratched at it. Neither of us moved to let her out.
"Well," Winston said. "Ain't we a pair."
He stood up from the chair and left his hat on the seat. He crossed the room and stopped in front of me, close enough that I could smell Sierra's soap on his skin and the whiskey on his breath and something underneath both that was just him.
"I came here so you could fuck me," he said. "In case that wasn't clear."
"It was clear when you showed up with flowers."
"Good." He brought his hand up and put his thumb on the bruise under my left eye, light, barely pressure, just enough to sting. "Because I've been thinking about it since the highway. Standing out there with your hands all over me, hard as a goddamn rock. And you just pulled away like it was easy."
I grabbed his wrist. "It wasn't easy."
He dropped his eyes to my lips and stayed there until I pulled his hands off my face. Then he leaned forward and kissed me.
The softness of it almost made me pull back.
His lips landed on mine like a question, and he brought his hand up to the side of my face and cupped my jaw.
The pad of his thumb rested against my cheekbone.
He parted his lips just enough and tilted his head and kissed me deeper, still slow, still careful, and the sound he made was quiet and aching and private.
My hands shook.
His mouth moved against mine, and I could taste the whiskey and the want underneath it. He kissed me like it mattered. Like I mattered.
I couldn't take it.
I bit his lip hard. Hard enough that he jerked back and brought his hand up to his mouth, and when he pulled it away, there was blood on his fingers. He looked at the blood, then at me, and his pupils blew wide.
"There he is," he said.
I grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and slammed him into the wall. The cat bolted off the bed and shot under it. The nightstand jumped and Chance's photo went down. I put my forearm across his chest to hold him there and put my mouth an inch from his ear.
"I would kill any man who put a hand on you," I said. "Anyone. I don't care who. I'd put him in the ground and I wouldn't lose a goddamn minute of sleep over it."
He went still under my arm.
I pulled back enough to see his face. His eyes were wide and his mouth was open and the blood on his lip was already drying.
"You hear me?"
"I hear you."