"Shame about what?" I ask, still looking at the door, as if I can will Luke turn around and come back into the store.
"Oh, you wouldn't know because you haven't been around here long enough, have you, honey?" she asks, shaking her head. "The father was a real son of a – well, you know – never treated those kids right. Mother wasn't that much better. Real pretty, though. Killed herself after the father died."
"That's terrible," I say. June has already told me about their parents' deaths, but now all I can think about is that scar on Luke's back and what it means about the kind of hell he's lived through.
"It's an odd thing, though," she says.
"What is?"
Connie shrugs, her brow furrowed. "It's just that she stayed with him all those years, you know? If that were me, and that man died, I'd take his stuff out into the street and have a celebration. Roast marshmallows over the bonfire."
"That is odd," I say. "I guess you never really know about people, do you?"
I begin to wonder about how Luke is dealing with his mother's death, but I don't get a chance to think about it for more than a second before Connie pushes a flyer across the counter at me. "You get one of those offers on your property?" she asks.
I glance down at the paper advertising a town hall meeting. "I did," I say. "Told them I wasn't interested."
"It's thirty-four ninety-two for the groceries," she says, tapping her finger on the paper. "You should come to this. People in town, they like you. Respect you. June too."
"Me?" I ask. "I've only lived here a couple of years."
"No, but they know your cider," she says. "And you're a businesswoman. Educated. They know you told the mining company no, too. You should tell them why."
"I don't know," I tell her. "I said no for personal reasons, not political ones."
"Well, I've heard there's been some shady business with some folks out here," Connie says. "People who've told them no and had problems after that."
"What?" I ask, but someone enters the store, interrupting us, and Connie is off, doing something else. I stuff the flyer in my grocery bag, pick up Olivia, who's only partially covered in ice cream, and head outside.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Luke
This town is the smallest place in the damn world. I wasn't prepared to run into Autumn and Olivia in the general store yesterday. I wasn't ready to see them. I was getting some space – and some beers – after reading that damn diary. I didn't want them to see me like that, and I did the only thing I knew to do to keep this shit away from them, and that was to walk away.
That damn diary.
Page after page of excruciating detail. I read the whole thing, driven by my need to understand why the hell she did what she did. I’m not even sure my brothers read the entire thing. They paged through what they needed to, and handed it over to me, glad to be rid of it.
I expected it to be filled with depressed ramblings about life or something – except it wasn't. Instead, she confesses to killing my father.
That should have made me feel happy. She finally grew some balls and killed the asshole. Except it just made me angry at her. After all that time, all those years of her beating her to a bloody pulp… Fuck, all those times he beat the shit out of us in front of her, she did nothing.
I'd always thought of her as being weak.
It turns out that she wasn't weak at all. Protecting her kids just wasn't enough incentive for her to get rid of him. But money was.
She wasn't weak; she was greedy.
The journal laid out everything – starting when my father discovered europium in the illegal old mine back behind the house where we grew up. He'd brought a sample to the geology teacher down at the high school where my father worked as a janitor. When the geology teacher found out what it was, he'd gone to a mining company he thought would be interested – and was bought off. And after the mining company started buying properties in West Bend, with the wheels greased by the town sheriff and the mayor, my father thought he was going to get rich. He'd gotten drunk and bragged to my mother about the life they were going to have.
It turns out that my mother already had a life that didn't involve him. She was having an affair with the senior Jed Easton – the fucking mayor of West Bend.
It also turns out that she had more balls than any of us would have ever thought.
She hit my asshole father in the head with a rock. Since he was a drunk and no one gave a shit whether he lived or died, it was ruled an accidental death. But my mother wanted him silenced so she could get the payout. And she didn't simply want to sell the property to the mining company.
As it turns out, my mousy, asked-for-nothing-our-entire-life, never-voiced-her-opinion mother wanted more than that. She wanted a kickback from Jed and the Mayor, money to buy her silence. She was going to blow the whole thing wide open, everything going on the town – her affair with the Mayor, the fact that he and Jed were dirty as fuck, the mining company’s scam to scoop up properties from town residents at a price that was less than fair.
She was stupid and greedy.
And that’s why she died.
Before, I felt sorry for her. I’d felt sorry for her my whole life. I imagined her as a victim, the much-too-young wife of my asshole father, too spineless to leave him, too beat-down by life to be more than just a punching bag.
Except she wasn’t.
She simply didn’t think protecting us was important enough to consider leaving him. As it turned out, money was the catalyst for that.
When I went into the general store yesterday, I was fucking reeling from the realization. And when I saw Autumn and Olivia, I had to get away from them as quickly as I could. They're everything that's good, everything that's light, everything that's perfect. And my bullshit – all of this darkness – would just taint them.
Yesterday at the general store, I was going to tell her to get lost. I was going to hurt her, say something terrible to push her away from me. That's what I should have done. It would be the honorable thing. My family's shit -- my history – isn’t the kind of thing she and Olivia should be exposed to.
Instead, I was weak yesterday. I stood there, wrestling with the part of me that should let her go, never see her again. But I couldn't bring myself to do it.
And even worse? Now I'm here. I'm sitting here in my truck, outside of her house, at seven in the morning, as if it's a normal day and I'm about to go to work.
As if nothing happened between us.
As if everything is exactly the same.
I'm sitting here, debating whether to back out of her driveway, go down the road, and turn around. I could do it. I could drive away and never look back. I could put this entire town in my rearview mirror, leave everything in this world behind. I could leave behind this shit with my family, with my mother and Jed and West Bend, just the way Killian did, going back to the oil rig.
It would be entirely justifiable.
Autumn would understand. After all, she did the same thing once before. She left Kentucky without a backward glance.
She expects me to leave. She knows my reputation, and if she doesn't, well, she can assume the worst.
The worst has always been the truth.
I've never wanted more than just a roll in the hay with a girl. That night with Autumn was different. I didn't want to get the fuck out of her house as soon as I could. I wanted to stay there all night, buried as deeply inside her as I could be, touching her and looking at her and breathing her in.
I lay there awake after she'd finally fallen asleep, after we'd talked and talked, the way I'd never wanted to do with anyone, her warmth radiating against me. I lay there and listened to her breathe and felt calm for the first time that I can remember. That restless feeling, the itch that always sends me chasing something -- the next girl, the next adventure, the next high – was noticeably absent.
I was still.
Stillness isn't something I'm used to. My life has been the exact opposite of stil
l since the day I was born into the total chaos of the Saint family. Hell, smoke jumping is as far away from still as you can get – it's pure adrenaline, your heart pounding, every muscle in your body tensed and on edge as you parachute from a plane into the path of a raging fire. It's loud, louder than the loudest thing you can imagine, like being in the middle of a heavy metal concert, but instead of music it's the deafening sound of fire -- crackling, snapping, the croaking of trees as they fall to the ground.
Lying there, holding Autumn, being still…I should have hated everything about that moment. I should have wanted to be out of her bed and on to the next conquest. Instead, it felt like that moment when you catch your breath, drink in big gulps of oxygen, after you finish sprinting, and you're glad to be no longer moving.
Right now, I sit here in front of Autumn's house, unmoving. And it's exactly the opposite feeling. I'm not glad to be still.
I'm sitting here because I'm torn between the right thing to do and the thing I want to do. The right thing to do is to keep my family bullshit way the hell away from Autumn, tell her I quit, walk away and let her believe I'm just an immature asshole who wanted a quick lay before moving on to another girl.
That's how this story should go.
That's the version of this story where Autumn isn't tainted by the Saint bullshit, by my family's legacy, by the darkness that follows me wherever I go.
But I don't do the right thing. I don't turn around and walk away. Instead, I open the door and walk toward the house.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Autumn
“Daisy,” I say, squatting down to show Olivia the flower. She takes it between her chubby little fingers, before putting it up to her nose and sniffing deeply. Overtaken by the need to sneeze, she wrinkles her nose and sneezes loudly.
“Daisy,” she repeats, throwing it on the ground with disgust and wiping her nose as she looks at me accusingly.
“Hey, that wasn’t my fault,” I say, laughing. “I didn’t make you sneeze. What an attitude. You're a toddler going on sixteen years old.”
Olivia recovers immediately, ignoring me as she darks forward, taking uneven, uneasy steps through the grass, off to discover something else. She’s been awake since five this morning, burning with incredible energy that I’m jealous of, so we’re on an early nature walk, which basically means we’re exploring the yard while I mainline caffeine and try to keep my bleary eyes open.
We make our way at a snail’s pace across the lawn, when I see Luke’s truck in the front. Lucy reaches us, bounding across the grass, her tail wagging excitedly. She paws at my leg in greeting, then makes her way over to Olivia, where she drops down in the grass in front of her, head over her paws, tail still swishing back and forth. Olivia squeals, then flops down on her belly in the grass, a mirror image of the dog.
“Lucy’s found her soul mate," Luke says.
I’m focused so intently on Olivia – more specifically, on making sure that Olivia doesn’t yank the ears off the poor dog – that I don’t even notice Luke walking up. But as soon as I hear his voice, my heart races, and the familiar heat I felt before in his presence immediately returns.
I’m not sure if the butterflies in my stomach are attraction or nerves.
He walks toward me, faded denim and a grey weathered t-shirt that looks so soft I immediately want to run my hands across the fabric. Across his chest.
But he looks tired, the same way he appeared when I saw him in the store. There’s a sadness in his eyes that makes me want to hug him, but instead, I stand there with my hands in the pockets of my jeans. “I didn’t think you’d be back,” I say.
Damn it. That’s what you lead with, Autumn? It sounds like you don’t want him here.
Shit. I keep telling myself I haven’t dated anyone in two years because I’ve been focused on being a mother. But hell, I’m just awful at dating. Of course, we’re not exactly dating, are we? All we had was a little fling that meant nothing. That’s what I tell myself as I stand here in front of him, my heart fluttering in my chest like I’m a teenage girl with a crush.
“Apparently I’m a glutton for punishment,” Luke says, one eyebrow raised. “But I can leave if you’d like.”
“No!” I say, my voice firm. “I mean, you can stay. If you want. I’m not telling you to stay. Only if you want to stay. I mean…damn it. I’m sorry. About the other day.”
Fuck. This apology is coming out well.
“You were right,” he says. “I shouldn’t have presumed.”
I dig the toe of my shoe into the dirt, not looking at him. “You were trying to do something nice,” I say. “But that’s my kid.”
“I get it, man,” he says. “I mean, I had you pegged as the paranoid type, for sure.”
I look up, mouth half open, about to really give him a piece of my mind, but he’s grinning, his hands raised in the air in mock surrender. “Man?”
Luke laughs and winks. “It's an expression,” he says, mock punching me lightly on the arm. “We’re totally friends, right?”
I raise my eyebrows. “What is it you youngsters say? We’re bros?”
He laughs long and low, the sound warm. Then he steps forward, crossing the space between us, and looks down at me. “We’re not bros, Red.”
“Friends, then,” I say, my throat suddenly thick.
“Nope.”
“No?” I ask.
“Do you want to be friends?” he asks.
Do I want to be friends? I can barely remember my own name when he stands this close to me, looking down at me the way he does right now. “Maybe.”
“Well, I sure as hell don’t,” he says.
From a few feet away, Olivia emits a high-pitched squeal, and Luke and I both startle. She flaps her arms wildly, and beside her, Lucy jumps erratically through the grass, chasing something. "Lucy-girl," Luke calls. "She's probably tearing after a frog. She loves those."
Olivia trails after Lucy, a toddler trying to keep up with whatever exciting drama the dog brings, and we follow the two across the lawn silently.
"I didn't mean to jump your ass before," I say. "I know you were trying to be nice. I just...haven't…"
Luke pauses beside me, looking at me. "Been around someone so damn hot before?"
I'm in the middle of a sip of coffee, and I almost spit it. "Yeah, that's it."
My voice practically drips with sarcasm, except he has pegged it exactly. I'm losing my shit over a hot guy. It's ridiculous, and the narcissistic ass totally knows it.
"It's a common problem," Luke says. "I don't mean to brag, but I deal with it a lot, you know."
“I imagine women are always losing their shit around you," I say.
“You mean it as an insult, but I take it as a compliment,” Luke says, grinning.
“I think you take everything as a compliment.”
“Daisy!” Olivia runs toward us, her distaste for the flower now forgotten. I reach out for it, but she hands it to Luke instead.
“Well, now, thank you, little Olivia,” he says, squatting down and taking the proffered flower for a second, before she rips it back from his hand and laughs as she turns around. He stands up, watching her run away. “Well, hell, for a second there I thought I was special.”
“At least you got offered a flower, not entirely co-opted,” I say. “Her affection is fleeting.”
Luke turns toward me, his gaze penetrating. “What about her mother’s?”
My breath hitches in my throat. “What about her mother’s what?”
“Is yours?”
I clear my throat. My heart is pounding in my chest so loudly I swear he must be able to hear it. “Is my affection fleeting?”
“That’s what I asked,” he says, running a finger down my arm, the movement so subtle it would be barely perceptible to anyone