16. Wentworth
SIXTEEN
Wentworth
I spend the rest of the day finishing up a sketch of Delilah I’ve been working on for a few weeks. Afterward, I wander around the empty house, unsure of what to do with myself until I end up on the porch again.
Settling into what’s fastly becoming my chair , I aim my gaze across the lake again, watching the way the setting sun plays across the water while I think about the way the rancher’s daughter looked at me—not when I woke up to find her staring at my dick. Later, when she was talking about my tattoos.
Like art .
That’s how she described them.
Remembering it tightens my chest for some reason. Probably because my imaginary therapist is right—I do use my tattoos as a kind of armor to protect myself from the outside world and here she comes along, a complete stranger, and just... slips right past it.
I run a hand over the tattoo of a Koi fish, inked into my forearm. My first, but absolutely not my last. Whoever said tattoos are addictive wasn’t kidding.
Dropping my arm, I sit up a little straighter in my chair when I catch movement across the lake. The same dog that was watching me earlier is back, standing at the edge of the water, looking at me while I look back. Wondering if Kait bought anything at the grocery store that a dog might want to eat, I watch its entire body snap to attention a moment before it turns and darts back into the woods, swallowed by the thick tree line in an instant.
As soon as it’s gone, I hear the growl of a truck engine, coming closer and closer until the pick-up that brought me here comes into view.
Standing, I move to the porch steps and watch while Damien kills the engine on his truck and climbs from the driver seat, slamming the heavy door behind him before he makes his way around the front of it.
“Thought maybe we could do some brotherly bonding or some shit,” he says, holding up a six-pack of bottled beer. “Maybe cook those steaks Kait brought you.”
I narrow my eyes a bit, trying hard to beat back the dizzying swirl of guilt and jealousy that starts churning in my gut when he says her name. Guilt because no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to keep my promise and behave when it comes to her and jealousy because... well, just because. I haven’t figured that out yet and to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I want to. Instead of trying, I push it all aside and focus on my brother. “How do you know she brought me steaks?”
“Because we’re standing in the middle of a Montana cattle ranch, little brother,” Damien says, mounting the porch steps on a laugh. Stopping next to me at the top of the steps, he pulls a chilled bottle from the cardboard carrier and hands it to me. “She sure as fuck didn’t bring you tofu.”
Thirty minutes ago, I was content to be alone. Now, I’m glad Damien’s here.
Family is weird—especially ours.
As soon as he got here, Damien retrieved the pair of paper-wrapped steaks from the fridge and opened them up. Leaving them to come to room temperature, he steps out onto the back porch long enough to turn on the propane grill before coming back into the kitchen. Seasoning the steaks, he carries them back outside, motioning for me to follow with a grab the beer .
“Kota called,” he tells me while he adjusts one of the steaks—some of the fattest ribeyes I’ve ever seen—on the searing hot grill. “I told her you were here. I hope you don’t mind.”
I mind.
I mind because even though she’s my sister, I barely know her. Reminding myself that if I can trust Delilah of all people with the location of my hideout, I can trust someone who basically amounts to a complete stranger.
“Nope.” I shake my head while I lift the beer to my mouth, taking a long pull while Damien watches me carefully.
“She won’t say anything, Went,” he assures me, reading my body language and tone perfectly. “I wouldn’t have told her if I thought we couldn’t trust her.”
We.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been a we .
We’re a team, Wentworth. You, Lilah, your grandmother, and me—and we’re always going to be.
“Okay.” It comes out rusty and rough and I have to look away while I take another drink of my beer to ease some the achiness from my throat. “I trust you.”
“No, you don’t.” Damien shoots me a smirk while he flips the steaks to reveal a set of picture-perfect grill marks. “But that’s alright. I get it. ”
“I trusted you enough to call you for help,” I remind him, insulted for some fucked-up reason.
“I think what you meant to say is desperate.” His smirk morphs into a laugh. “You were desperate enough to call me for help.”
Because I don’t have an answer for that—at least not one that won’t end up with us throwing each other around the back porch, I look away again and give him a shrug. “She said something weird this morning,” I say instead, desperate to change the subject.
When I say she, Damien’s brow collapses in on itself. “ She —you mean Kait.”
“Yeah.” I give him a nod, remembering the way she looked at me when I called her Sunshine this morning.
My name is Kaitlyn. You can call me that or you can call me Kait.
“Kait.” I say her name out loud and immediately decide I don’t like it. “She said she’d find a place to hide out and finish watching her lecture,” I tell him before taking another drink of my beer, this one draining it. “What did she mean— hide out ?”
For a second, Damien doesn’t answer me. I think he’s trying to formulate a response. Instead, he comes back with a question of his own. “Why would she have to find a place to hide out to finish anything? You said she could work here—or did you change your mind again?”
“No.” I shake my head while I set my empty on the porch railing I’m leaning up against. “I didn’t change my mind. I just—”
“What did you do?” Pulling the steaks from the grill, Damien sets them on a cutting board to rest before he turns to aim a glare in my direction. “And don’t say nothing because we both know you did something .”
I know she didn’t tell him what happened this morning—that she found me sleeping, mostly naked and hard as a rock, on the couch—because when Damien climbed out of his truck, he was carrying a six-pack and not a baseball bat. But still, it’s probably best I explain the situation in case she changes her mind and tells my brother about what a perv I am. “I fell asleep on the couch last night,” I tell him quickly while trying to navigate around the parts that’ll piss him off. “She found me and I was...” I swipe a hand over my face on a rough sigh. “It was morning , man—what do you want me to say?”
He stares at me blankly for a few seconds before the lightbulb pops on. When it does, his glare sharpens to a razor’s edge. “Kait found you sleeping on the couch with a fucking hard-on ?”
“ It. Was. Morning .” I repeat myself, biting each word in half. Lying my ass off because morning had nothing to do with it and everything to do with her. “ I don’t make the rules and I can’t control biology. It just happened and it’s not like I chased her around with it or anything, for fuck’s sake. I just—”
“Jesus Christ...” Tossing the tongs he was using to flip the steaks onto the cutting board, he slams the grill lid closed. “I need you to listen to me very carefully, Went—one—” He holds up a finger, all but shoving it in my face and it takes every bit of patience and self-control I have to not slap it away. “Kota told me what’s really going on with you—what happened in LA. Why you’re here.”
Shit.
I don’t have to ask how she found out—Dakota is a college student. College students thrive on social media celebrity culture and I’m sure photos of me in every sort of conceivable, compromising position are plastered all over every tabloid and celebrity gossip site in the country. Before I can ask him exactly what she heard, Damien shoves finger number two in my face. “And two—and I’m going to say it slowly this time so hopefully it’ll sink into that thick fucking skull of yours—the last thing Kait needs is to deal with you and your fuckboy bullshit.”
Something about the way he says it, the way his jaw flexes and grinds between words tightens the back of my neck.
“What’s going on?” Giving in, I slap his hand out of my face. When he doesn’t haul back and punch me in it, I take a step forward, closing the gap between us. “And don’t say nothing because we both know it’s something ,” I tell him, throwing his earlier words back at him. Flipping through the few interactions Kait and I have had, I think about how desperate she was to keep coming up here to study—desperate enough to agree to model for me even though I could tell that the prospect made her highly uncomfortable. What she said to me this morning when I commented on how seriously she seemed to take her education.
Yeah, I did... for all the good it did me.
Even stranger was the way she said it. Like she was trapped. At the end of the road only to find a dead end.
“Is she in trouble?” When I ask, Damien’s jaw tightens again, a split second before it relaxes.
“It’s not my place to say,” he says carefully. “I just work here.” Picking up the cutting board, he turns away from me to head back into the house. “Grab the beer—let’s eat.”