The Renegade (The Moorehouse Legacy #3)(39)

“You okay, Spike?”

“Brace yourself. I’m about to go sissy on you.”

Alex had to smile. “Just as long as you don’t try and hold my hand.”

“Look, I know that what happened with your partner is eating you alive. And I think it’s more than just about him being gone. Did you try and save him, Alex? Did you try and save him and lose him in the end?”

Alex recoiled.

“Yeah,” Spike said softly. “That’s it, isn’t it. You lost him out on that boat, didn’t you?”

“How do you…”

Spike’s eyes flipped across the seat. They seemed to glimmer, becoming otherworldly in their golden intensity.

“We’ve all got demons, man. Some we work through. Some are ghosts we foxtrot into the grave with. But here’s the thing. Time’s short. Life’s shorter. A blink of an eye and you’ve missed what you wanted, what you needed.” Spike looked back out into the night. “Death’s damn cold and it lasts forever once it shakes your hand. So take the warmth now, my man. Take it where you find it. Forgive yourself just enough to let some in, okay?”

Alex stared at his buddy and frowned. “What the hell happened to you?”

Spike’s dark smile brought chills. “Ah, but we’re talking about your curse, not mine. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got a party to get back to. There are a number of women dying to take advantage of my charms, and I’m in the mood to be used.”

Alex got out of the car. Before he shut the door, he leaned down. “I just realized something. I don’t know all that much about you. Where are you from, anyway?”

Spike moved the gearshift back and forth in Neutral. His sun-colored eyes flashed. “Oz.”

Alex chuckled. “Which one are you? The lion, the scarecrow?”

Spike winked and put the car in gear. “The wizard.”

Alex shut the door and watched the Honda take off down the drive, wondering what was in his friend’s past.

Then he took a couple of deep breaths, sucking the cold night into his lungs.

Leaving Cassandra had been the right thing to do. It wasn’t just that O’Banyon was up and the last thing she needed was to get caught between two jealous men. It was mostly because if he’d stayed much longer, he would have taken her back to the shop with him and woken up next to her in the morning. And he would have…finished.

Which was a bad idea, all the way around. Just because he’d outed his need for her, didn’t mean the essential dynamic between them had changed.

So it was just as well that O’Banyon was with her over the weekend.

Well, provided Alex didn’t think about the two of them together.

Cursing himself, he went into the shop and fired up the potbellied stove, stoking it for the night. He undressed and hit the mattress. As the temperature rose, he shoved the covers from his upper body and flopped onto his back.

Staring at the ceiling, he thought of Spike’s words.

What if he could forgive himself a little? Just enough to have Cassandra once. Only once. The aftermath would be a tossing sea of guilt, but the taking…the taking would be wondrous.

God, he was a bastard, he thought. To even think such a thing.

He turned his head and looked at the desk where his father’s plans were laid out.

His father never would have found himself in this situation. Ted Moorehouse had had honor. Honor in the life he’d led and in how he cared for the people who mattered.

Alex was ashamed to admit it, but he had pitied his father. Had been so focused on the brighter horizon he hadn’t understood how someone could live such a small life.

Now he would settle for being half the man his father had been.

Alex closed his eyes and went back into the past. He saw barbecues on the front lawn with his father at the grill and him shucking corn on the back step. He remembered ice fishing on the lake in March when they’d shared hot chocolate and rubbed their hands over a little propane heater. He returned to the times he and his father had climbed the mountain behind the house in the spring and gotten mud in their boots.

Funny, he couldn’t recall much about the last five finish lines he’d crossed. He’d gone past so many that the particulars of each one were a blur now.

The memories of his father, though, were as vivid as the experiences had been. He could bring up the smells of smoke and molasses off the grill, the taste of the cocoa, the mucky, creepy feeling of having mud slide around the inside of his boot like a molten sock.

And those things had happened twenty years ago.

God, he had lost so much, and the losing had started before his father and mother had died. It had started when he’d left his family behind.

Alex took a deep breath and tried to let go, but his regrets had set up shop and were staying put. They were like an ant farm in his chest, little paths of teeming remorse, always moving, always shifting, never, ever getting free.

He had to smile, thinking this was a hell of a way to break in the New Year. All around the world people were partying and blowing shooters and pitching confetti. Meanwhile, he was in bed with one hell of a dominatrix: Mistress Conscience.

*

Sometime later Alex came awake to the feel of something on his chest: a soft stroke over his naked skin.

He shot up and grabbed hold of—

“Cassandra? What are you doing here?” He released her wrist as he realized how very naked he was. He pulled the blankets up farther on his chest.