Thick as Thieves(87)

“So your rudeness was a defense mechanism against the sudden attraction?”

“Not the attraction itself, but the unlikelihood that anything could come of it.”

“If nothing was to come of it, you decided not even to bother being polite, but to act like a jerk instead.”

“Something like that, I guess.”

Pensively, she said, “That makes sense, because it didn’t take me long to recognize in you something I’ve often been cursed with.”

“What’s that?”

“Loneliness,” she whispered. “Your macho posturing made me mad. But I also came away thinking that underneath the tough-guy veneer, you were a lonely person, and that possibly your loneliness was self-imposed. I believe my intuition was right.”

She removed her hand from his cock and placed it on his thigh, just above his knee, and rubbed it tenderly. And somehow that caress was ten times more intimate than the other. She was comforting and consoling him.

Which God knew he didn’t deserve, and which she wouldn’t be doing if she knew how badly he was deceiving her. He couldn’t allow it. He lifted her hand from his leg and kissed the palm of it.

She touched his left biceps. “What’s this?”

He turned his arm so she could see the tattoo better in the dim light. She traced the familiar figure eight with her fingertip. “Why the infinity symbol?”

Even after she withdrew her finger, he continued to stare at the marking that held such meaning for him. “Whatever we do stays with us forever. We can’t shake it, can’t escape it. It’s eternal, there even after we die.”

She frowned. “Wait. Aren’t you the one who advised me to acknowledge the past, then to turn my back on it and move on?”

“I later said that was horseshit.”

But she wasn’t smiling at his quip. Her expression was serious and inquisitive. “What is it you can’t shake or escape, Ledge?”

Tell her. Tell her now.

He looked toward the window where their bourbons remained untouched on the sill. The ice cubes had melted.

Selfish bastard that he was, he wanted to indulge in a few more minutes of this interlude before shattering her opinion of him.

The rain continued to come down, but not as hard as before. He said, “I have an idea.”

“All right.”

“You don’t know what I have in mind.”

“Do I have to move?”

“Not much.”

He got off the bed and hiked on his jeans but didn’t bother buttoning them up all the way. In short order, he had Arden wrapped in the coverlet and was carrying her through the house and out onto the front porch, kept dry because of the overhang.

He settled into the rocking chair with her in his lap, his arms encircling her.

She squirmed a bit to snuggle closer against him. “Did you make this chair?”

“Few years ago.”

“Was our sitting in it together like this another of your fantasies?”

“The only one that didn’t involve fucking.”

She laughed and laid her head against his chest. Tweaking the hair on his pec, she said, “This is lovely. The sound of the rain on the roof. The scent of it.”

“Um-huh.”

After a short stretch of silence, she said, “Ledge? When you needed help tonight, you called Don, not your uncle. Why?” She must have felt him tense, because her fingers became still and she raised her head to look at him. “I know he reared you, but you don’t talk much about him.”

He leaned his head back against the slats of the chair and began to rock slowly. “My dad was Henry’s brother, older by barely a year. My dad was in the navy, stationed in San Diego. He was about to be deployed to a ship that patrolled the Persian Gulf.

“I wasn’t even two years old, so I don’t remember any of this, but I’m told that he and my mom went out with a group of friends for one final fling before the men shipped out. They rode home with a guy who shouldn’t have been driving. He plowed them into a bridge abutment. Killed everyone in the car.”

She returned her head to his chest. “Unlike you, I at least have vivid memories of my mother. Although I’m not sure if that’s better or worse.”

“I can’t say. My uncle Henry and aunt Brenda came out there to get me and brought me back to Penton, where they were trying to make a go of the bar. Life with them was the first one I remember. They treated me like their own. Maybe because they never had a kid.

“When I was six or seven, thereabouts, Aunt Brenda got really sick, really fast, and died of stomach cancer three months after her diagnosis. So then, my uncle Henry was stuck with me to raise by himself. But if he resented it, he never once, not ever, showed it.

“When I got my discharge from the army and came back, he was his same jolly self. Everybody’s friend. But I noticed that he would be in the middle of one of his bad jokes and forget the punch line, and usually it was a joke he’d told a hundred times.”

“Oh, no,” Arden murmured. Again she lifted her head and looked into his face. “Alzheimer’s?”

“I finally had to put him in a place in Marshall. For his own safety. It’s a nice facility. He’s well looked after. The staff—”

She leaned up and stopped his lips with hers. “You don’t have to justify doing what is best for him and for you.”