Chapter Eleven
Denver was a man of action. When words failed, doing the right thing served even better. His father had been a man who kept
a store of pretty words designed to manipulate the people around him. Denver wasn’t sad, usually, that words weren’t his primary
method of communicating.
Right now he wished he could give her vows. Like a knight in shining armor, which he’d never been. Not even close.
So instead he just kissed her. He wanted . . . he wanted for things to be different. He wanted to take the whole world and
rearrange it. For her.
It was different than wanting to pay for things because he was responsible for it. This was a deep sort of grief he didn’t
fully understand.
Anger at the way life hurt people like her. Over and over again.
But she was right. She was that flowering vine. Stubborn and endless. She wouldn’t be uprooted, just because some asshole
tried it.
She kept growing. Beautiful and stubborn with it. A blooming middle finger to a world that had tried to suppress her.
He had known that she was strong. But he hadn’t realized just how much she carried. No wonder she hadn’t mourned the death of her father.
Denver wanted to dig up his body just so he could spit on it.
He kissed her, and he waited. For her to deepen the kiss. For her to show him that she wanted this.
She put her hand on his face, and kissed him back.
Need vibrated through him. This feeling of sorrow and connection, driving him now. Something different than anything he’d
ever experienced. But then, it had been. From the beginning.
From the time they’d kissed at Smokey’s to now.
And when he laid her down on the bed, put the condom on and buried himself inside of her, it was different than just chasing
pleasure.
He looked into her eyes, and kissed her. And felt his whole world ignite.
Then she shattered beneath him, her own orgasm claiming her, her need the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
He could feel something, sinking down into the cracks inside of him. Those weak points.
And he knew that he’d let it go too far.
When she looked at him in the gray light of the bedroom, he knew she felt it too.
Suddenly there was distance where before there had been a driving closeness. He could feel a clawing in his chest, something
like panic, except he never panicked. Not under gunfire or when his father had gone to prison. Not ever. But it told him he
had to go home.
It was the strangest feeling. This desire to pull away and stay at the same time.
“I needed this,” she whispered.
“Me too,” he said.
They both knew that it was goodbye. Not to each other, because they would see each other tomorrow.
But goodbye to this. To whatever had compelled both of them to strip themselves naked, past skin, and down deeper.
To the deepest, darkest parts of themselves.
But maybe that had been as inevitable as the rest of this.
Maybe they had needed to tell each other those things.
He would take what she’d told him and bury it down inside of him with all the rest of those secret horrors. And she would
keep his own sad truth, she supposed.
He got out of bed and disposed of the second condom, before heading out to the living room and beginning to dress. She didn’t
follow him.
But once he was dressed he did go back into the bedroom, compelled toward her because he just was. “Are you okay?”
“Sure am,” she said. “All that was news to you. It wasn’t news to me.”
His lips quirked upward. “Fair.”
“Plus multiple orgasms are a surefire way to lift the mood.”
Normally, yes. Why he didn’t feel lifted, he couldn’t say.
“I guess you better get a quality couple of hours,” she said to him.
“Yeah,” he said, rubbing his hand over his face. He found that he didn’t actually want to leave, not really. There was discomfort
clawing at his chest that had told him to get up, get ready and go. But now that it came right down to it, he didn’t want
to walk out the door.
Which was empirical evidence that he needed to.
He left, and he drove back to the ranch, but he didn’t go to sleep. Instead, he went into the main event hall and started
plotting and planning things for the Christmas event. Which was where he still was when Landry showed up.
“Hey there. You made it back.”
“Yes, I did,” said Denver.
“What’s going on?”
“Not much,” he said. “Just getting everything ready for the Christmas thing. Fia is on to take care of the baking, right?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to put her under too much stress. With the baby and all.”
“Don’t worry about it. The entire army of Sullivans is going to descend to handle the baking, plus I guarantee everyone is
going to take turns holding Gray, given he’s the newest addition. It’s going to be awesome. But you know, Evelyn and Violet
Garrett have offered to make some things too.”
That struck him as . . . strange. Not that they didn’t all help each other; they did. The Kings always contributed barbecue
to every event. But usually, they weren’t events happening at King’s Crest.
“They really want to come out here and . . . help?”
“Yeah.”
That just struck him as being strange. Something he didn’t expect. And it was maybe the one thing that could get his mind
off of Sheena, the intensity of last night and how exhausted he was today.
“I need some coffee,” said Denver.
“Okay.”
“I haven’t had any.”
“Are you sick?” Landry asked.
“No. Just . . . preoccupied with all of this.”
He walked out of the event space, and out into the gravel drive, just in time to see the taillights on Sheena’s car as she
drove through to get to her the gaming hall.
He had the sudden, intense urge to run after the car. Which was . . . He needed coffee.
Denver shook his head, and began to walk toward the farmhouse. He could feel Landry watching him.
“Anything you want to talk about?”
“No. I really don’t,” Denver said.
Landry looked at him, all serious. His brother had always been hard to read. Hell, he’d had a whole secret baby in high school
and no one had known about it. “I worry about you, you know. Because you took care of us for all those years, and nobody really
took care of you.”
“Oh please. This is all soft nonsense because you went and got yourself married. And I am really happy for you. Because God
knows we’ve had enough . . . enough stuff.”
“I just thought that maybe you might want the same thing.”
He thought about it. He really did. Because maybe the truth was, all of this stuff, all of this planning, all of this shifting,
was to try and do something about the fact that he felt like life was moving in a direction he couldn’t go. That his family
was moving at a pace he wasn’t going to be able to match.
Maybe that was it. Maybe that was a problem that he was having.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m not going to have it.”
“Why?”
“There’s too much to do,” he said.
Maybe he was just still . . . reduced a little bit, from that night with Sheena, from sharing with her; maybe he was just
tired. And he didn’t have the normal defenses in place.
“That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a wife. Kids.”
“It’s a job well done that you do,” Denver said as they reached the front porch. “Honestly. That’s what I wanted. Was for
you guys to be . . . able to have better than what we did. And don’t you worry, I already have better. I can be proud of what
we did here. What we are doing.”
He could stay busy. He could keep working. But the problem was, he was his father’s son.
And so he just had to keep going. He had to keep proving that he wasn’t Elias King.
To himself more than anything else.
Everything that Sheena had told him . . . It left a sour feeling in his stomach.
Because his dad had called the kind of men who hurt her his friends. She’d had to take care of herself. Nobody else had.
He hated that. More than anything.
He didn’t spend much time wishing he could go back in the past and change things, but he wished that he could go back and
protect her. He wished that he could go back and take care of her.
When Penny had been left all alone, he had gone and taken her in. He’d been older than her, and things had been more stable
on the ranch. He’d been in charge of things for several years, and he had felt equipped to actually do something good in her
life.
He just wished that he’d . . . done the same for Sheena. And her sisters.
“Whatever you’re thinking, stop,” said Landry.
Denver pushed the door open and walked into the kitchen, pushing the button on the coffee maker, which was thankfully ready
to go, because he didn’t like to have to put together a whole pot of coffee before he’d had his coffee, so he always set it
again after he emptied a pot.
“How do you know I’m thinking anything?”
“It’s . . . it’s you. I look around, I see you .
. . already hard at work at seven in the morning.
You’ve been out there God knows how long, without coffee, Denver, like a damned masochist. But you never think that you’re doing enough.
You never think that it’s enough. It’s always going to be the next thing, the next poker game, the next win, the next victim of Dad’s that you have to pay off.
The next new venture at King’s Crest. And all of that is stuff, and it’s great, Denver.
You’ve done some great stuff. But none of it is .
. . None of it is yours, not really. You’re doing all this for everybody else, and what are you doing for you? ”
“I don’t need to do anything for me,” Denver said. “Because the truth is . . . The truth is, Landry,” he said, grabbing a
mug and slamming it down on the table as he stared at the coffee, which was making far too slowly, “I am just really grateful
that I haven’t . . . that I haven’t transformed into our dad. And I don’t want to upset the balance of everything. So yeah.
Yeah, I look at what you guys have and . . . it’s great. Who wouldn’t want it? But I just can’t. I can’t for the life of me
figure out how I would . . .”