Unbreakable (28 page)

“I wouldn’t have.”

But he said nothing about it being the right thing to do. “You were just going to let him get away with it?”

“No, but I would’ve handled it.”

She didn’t say anything to that. She just waited for him to realize he hadn’t handled anything yet. “So…”

He drank from his longneck, his gaze holding hers. “Thank you. I’m not so good with handling things.”

“You’re going to have to get good with it if you’re planning on keeping him around.”

He leaned his head to the side, cracked his neck, did the same on the other. “Yeah. I know. I’ll figure it out.”

“Do it now, Casper. School’s already started. He’s already a grade behind.”

“Shit. I figured he was, but…He tell you that?”

She nodded.

“What else did he tell you?” he asked, his words a plea, not an accusation. He cared. He wanted to know. Seemed almost desperate to know.

She hitched up onto a barstool. “That his mother used drugs. A lot. That she most likely died of an overdose, but he doesn’t know for sure. Social services came to his trailer one morning and took him away. That was it. He didn’t get much in the way of answers.”

“Jesus.” He looked down at the longneck he’d propped on his belt buckle. “He told me she was a good mom.”

“I guess the one doesn’t preclude the other.”

“It does in my book,” he said, and drank.

“Did your mother use drugs?”

“My mother was a booze hound, which isn’t much different.”

“He said his mother brought home a lot of cowboys.” When he didn’t respond, she asked, “Do you think she took money from men? For sex?”

“She didn’t take it from me,” he said, and drank again.

“His mother reminds you of your mother, doesn’t she?”

“Hardly.”

“She came to you for sex. And left her six-year-old son alone at home.”

“She came to me for sex. But she brought me home with her,” he said, still drinking.

“With her six-year-old son nearby.”

“At least she was there.”

Until she wasn’t.
“Talk to him.”

“What?”

“Talk to him. Don’t give him chores and tell him how to do them. Talk to him. Help him. Fix this for him.” The boy had unloaded, not the least bit reluctant to stop the flow of words, as if he’d needed someone to talk to, someone to ask him about his life. Someone to care what he’d been through. Someone to want to make a difference.

And he was looking to Casper to be that man.

“I don’t want to talk about this, okay? I’m doing what I can. That’s what matters. Clay’s in trouble and he doesn’t have anyone he trusts to turn to.”

Just like Casper had never had anyone.

But to help him, to help them both, she needed to know Casper’s side, to hear him admit it. “Why is it so important to you to be there for this boy?”

“You’re asking me that? Seriously?” He gestured expansively, his expression incredulous, the bottle in his hand. “After what you saw in that house?”

But she continued to push. “You just told me his mother wasn’t like your mother.”

“They were both whores, okay? My mother just made a living at it, while Angie…Angie was just lonely.”

“Were you?”

“A whore?”

She was not going to tease him about this. “Were you lonely?”

“Sometimes. Not with women like Angie around. But sometimes.”

She didn’t believe him. “Clay said he didn’t know who his father was.”

He shook his head, sat forward, draped his wrists over his knees. “You two covered just about everything, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t torture anything out of him, Casper. He talked. I
listened.” She thought back to Clay deciding it was time to pay the piper. “He’s got it in him to be okay. Whatever happens.”

“I’m not going to let
whatever
”—another gesture, his arm flinging to the side—“happen. God
dammit
, Faith. I may not have grown up surrounded by family, but I know letting things
happen
is not how it’s done.”

“I just meant—”

“You just meant that I need to prepare for the worst. Prepare him for the worst.”

She waited, let that settle, then asked again, “Why is being there for him so important?”

“Because no one was there for me!” He surged to his feet, kicking at her coffee table when his boot snagged it, disappearing into the kitchen with the longneck he’d polished off. She expected to hear him jerk open the fridge for another, but it was silence that reached her instead.

She gave him a couple of minutes, then she followed, her bare feet soundless as they sunk into her plush carpeting. The kitchen was dark, the light from the eating nook catching him in profile where he stood with his hands on the sink. It lit his cheek and his neck and his elbow and forearm beneath his dark T-shirt’s sleeve.

He looked exhausted, beaten, weary in ways no amount of sleep or bill-paying money or ground-soaking rain would soothe. It cut her to the quick, that sense of defeat, as if he couldn’t face one more brick wall, one more dead end.

She came up behind him, got a raised hand and a sharp, “Don’t,” before she got close enough to touch him. “Just…don’t.”

Fine. She made a fist, bit her tongue, turned, and left the room. He could do his man-against-the-world thing and let himself out. She was going to bed.

And she did. At least she flounced into the middle of it, fully dressed, lying back and staring at the ceiling fan, fighting with herself to stay there, not to hop up and run back and tell him all the ways she could make things better for him. That doing so would make things better for her.

Her arms stretched out across the mattress, she dug her fingers into her comforter. She had to stop trying to fix him. He’d shown her the worst of his cracks, trusting her not to twist his vulnerability, or use it against him…yet she couldn’t bring herself to share hers.

God, she was such a hypocrite. She was the one who was really broken, who could not get beyond the mistakes she’d made in the past, who was still fighting against her adventurous nature jailed inside pantyhose and black pumps.

Wiping at the corners of her eyes, she took a deep breath, hearing Casper coming to her before she blew it out. He stopped in her doorway, leaned a shoulder against the jamb, crossed his arms and ankles, as if he had to get everything settled just right before he could speak.

She took that time to sit up, tucking her legs to the side since her skirt was too tight for anything else. And then she waited because that’s how this worked. Casper weighed the truth of what he carried, coming to her only when he’d stored the part of the burden he couldn’t share safely out of sight.

“I didn’t mean it. Telling you not to touch me.”

He’d bit off the word
don’t.
He’d said it twice. Sounded to her like he’d meant it, but she kept that to herself and continued to wait. She couldn’t rush him. She’d pushed him enough for one night, even if keeping her mouth shut was killing her.

After a moment, he dropped his shields and walked into her room. He settled onto the bed beside her, reached up and brushed her hair from her face, looking at her, but not into her
eyes. At her ear, her neck, her shoulder. “Why in the hell do you put up with me?”

“A question I am constantly asking myself,” she said, leaning into his touch.

“After everything you’ve seen—”

“Shh.” She brought her fingers to his lips. “Where you came from, what you’ve been through, that’s all in the past.”

“Except for who it turned me into. That’s all in the present.”

“I’m in the present, too. You seem to keep forgetting that.”

“I’ve been an ass, shutting you out this last week. It’s just been so much, all of it. Working at Summerlin’s, the house, Clay…”

“And the ranch.”

“I don’t even count the ranch anymore. It’s like the monster that will not die. Sometimes I think it would be easier if it would.”

But it wouldn’t. And they both knew that. “The zombie ranch, eating your brain.”

“If I had a brain, I would never have let this thing with Clay get to this point. I would’ve
handled it
as soon as I realized who he was and where he’d come from. I need to get it done.”

She took a deep breath, a hopeful breath, the flutter of wings in her chest hopeful, too. “Then we’ll go. Talk to whoever we need to talk to.”

“I’ll go. This isn’t your fight.”

“No, but you don’t have to fight on your own.”

“I
WANTED TO APOLOGIZE
again about Clay. About the other night. I shouldn’t have taken him to the diner. Or talked to him without first talking to you.”

Hunkered down at the rear of Remedy’s stall, hunting for his missing catch rope, Casper couldn’t help but grin as he listened to Faith ramble on. He had a really hard time believing she’d come all the way out here for that. More like she’d come out here because they hadn’t seen each other for three days now and she couldn’t wait any longer.

He’d been planning to head to her place tonight after he finished up at Summerlin’s because he couldn’t wait any longer either. Besides, they’d settled things about Clay on Tuesday before getting naked and losing hours of sleep. “You could’ve called.”

“I did call,” she said, pulling open the stall door and stepping inside. She had on blue heels to go with her blue skirt, and her
blouse had little things fluttering over her shoulders he guessed were supposed to be sleeves. “First your cell, which I learned has been disconnected. Then the house phone where I left a message. I even called Boone, though since he doesn’t keep his phone with him, I don’t know why. I guess I could’ve tried Dax, but I already felt like a nag.”

He got to his feet, the catch rope in his hand. “You’re not a nag, and you don’t need to apologize. You did what you thought was right, talking to him. You did what I should’ve done and didn’t. If anything, I’m the one who owes you.”

“Depends on what it is you think you owe. But speaking of owing,” she said before he could detail the things he had on his mind. She held out a business-sized envelope. “The reason I’m here. I’ve got a bill from John Massey covering the first stage of the demolition and build-out.”

“Figured you would’ve written a check and shown me the damage afterward,” he said, looking from the rope he held to the way her blouse pulled tight over her tits.

“You don’t have much faith in me as a business partner, do you? Besides, their terms are thirty days net, and I can earn enough interest in that time to put a big dent in the whole of the construction cost. I just wanted to make sure you saw it—”

Again. He didn’t believe that for a minute.

“—and to find out if you’ve made an appointment with Greg.”

Now that he believed. “Not yet. I’ll be getting a check tonight from Summerlin, so I’ll call him Monday first thing.”

“Use the phone in the tack room and call him now.”

“I’m pretty sure you just said something about not being a nag.”

“You didn’t need to wait to get a check. I would’ve loaned, not given,
loaned
you the money.”

“About your money…”

She shook her head and finger. “The first rule of my money is that we don’t talk about my money.”

He’d let her think that for now as he reached for the envelope, but took hold of her hand instead, sliding the loop of the rope over her wrist. “I could torture it out of you.”

“No, you couldn’t. No matter your opinion of my mouth—”

“Your mouth’s one of my favorite things in the world—”

“I can keep a secret. And what are you doing?”

“Tying you up,” he said, lashing her wrist against the stall’s door and backing her into the corner. “Give me your other hand.”

“After what you just did to this one,” she said, tugging at her bond, “I think the answer is no.”

He reached for her hand anyway, held her gaze as he used a length of broken rein to secure her to the stall’s top slat. Then he stepped back, his hands at his hips as he took her in, bound in place, annoyed, wearing too many clothes.

“Fun time’s over, cowboy. Let me go. I need to get home and get dinner and get out of these clothes—”

“I can help with that,” he said, and walked toward her, his grin pulling at his mouth in direct proportion to the widening of her eyes.

“You are not—”

“Oh, but I am,” he said, pressing his body flush to hers and reaching behind her to unzip her skirt.

He tugged it down just enough to free her blouse from her waist, then unbuttoned it before unhooking her bra. With her arms bound to the side, he had to make do with pushing the garments out of the way as he leaned down to tongue a nipple and suck her into his mouth.

“Casper!”

He lifted his head and offered her a “Yes, ma’am” before moving to the other nipple, tonguing, sucking, his hands at her skirt pulling it down.

“Casper!”

Her groan was a mix of arousal and desperation, and her head turned over her shoulder toward the barn door. He reached for his pocketknife and switched open the blade, pulling the elastic of her pantyhose from her body and slicing through the fabric.

“You’re costing me a fortune in pantyhose,” she hissed. “And panties,” she added as he cut those away, too, breathing her in, drawing the back of his hand over her bared lips.

When she groaned that time, he knelt in front of her, slid both thumbs into her folds to spread her open, exposing her clit that was full and begging to be sucked. The fact that she couldn’t move had his cock aching for the same, but first things first.

He had uptight Faith Mitchell bare-assed and tied to a stall in the barn. Could life possibly get any better?

He leaned forward, smelling her, his cock jumping. She was salty and ripe and warm. He licked from her tight little hole to her clit, getting her juice all over his chin as he dragged his tongue through her sex. She tasted like the best sort of cream, rich and thick and fresh, and his stomach rumbled. He caught her clit and pulled it between his lips, and she gasped. So he did it again, sucking harder this time, and she hissed some words he’d never have thought to hear come out of her mouth.

“Casper, let me go. What if Boone comes in? What about Dax and Clay?”