Untouched (20 page)

She didn’t do either.

“Sure I do,” Lark said, hands on her hips, her tone strangely calm. “I know exactly who he is. Quinn Parker, former rich boy, ex-con turned rodeo rider currently barred from the circuit. Occasional bouts of assholeishness followed by moments of shocking decency. Good with his hands.”

Damn. He was going to get killed. She was going to get him killed.

“Anything else you want to know?” Lark asked.

Cade looked like he was going to throw up. Or hit something. “Did he . . . did you?”

“Is that your business?” she asked.

“You did. You
fucked
him,” he spat, his voice laced with venom. “Even though you know what he did to me, you let him put his hands on you.”

And just like that, Quinn saw red. “Back off, Mitchell,” he growled. “If you want to be pissed at me, that’s fine, but you have no right to come in here and start yelling at her. You have no right to talk to her like that.”

“Where the hell do you get off telling me what I have the right to do, Parker? I’m her brother—who are you?”

And Quinn made the decision that, as days went, this was an okay one to die. “I’m her lover.”

Yeah. Shit. Getting your nose broken hurt. It wasn’t his first time getting his nose broken, but it had been a long time. The impact was so intense he saw stars, and very little else, because his eyes were watering like a son of a gun and his knees shook, giving out beneath him.

Back in his bar brawling days he’d done a lot better. And it had hurt less. Maybe because he was usually drunk when he got into those fights. Now he was eight years too sober to be taking hits to the face.

“Out!” Lark screamed.

He heard Lark shouting through his haze of unholy pain. Finally his vision started clearing, and he stood back up, wiping the blood off of his face with the back of his arm.

“Not without you.” Cole or Cade, he couldn’t hear the difference in the pain haze.

“Are you going to pick me up and carry me out? Because I don’t think you can do that. I am an adult, you’re on Quinn’s property, and you just assaulted him. I will call the cops on you, Cade, I swear it. Please don’t make me.”

“Lark . . .” Cade said, his voice choked.

“I’m serious. I would rather keep it between you and me. But if you don’t get the hell out right now, I’m not afraid to escalate it.”

He looked up and saw Cade walk out. Cole stood for a while and looked at Lark, who had a tear tracking down her cheek.

“Door’s open if you want to come home,” Cole said. “But you have to come alone.”

Cole turned away and slammed the front door shut, and Lark’s hand was on his arm.

“Are you okay?”

“Broken nose,” Quinn said, suddenly a little bit embarrassed that he hadn’t put in a better showing for Lark. But the alternative had been punching her brother, and then she would have been mad at him and not them. “Not the first time. But I feel like I should be asking you if you’re okay.”

“I can’t believe he did that to you. I can’t . . . what were they doing coming here to defend my virtue?”

“You
did
have virtue.”

“They don’t know that.”

“Honey, I’m sure they did. How many dates have you been on recently?”

“You haven’t taken me on a date. You’ve taken me on a table though.”

“Yeah, well”—he wiped at the blood running down his face again—“I’m still imagining they had a fair idea. Which, whether you like it or not, makes you the innocent party and me the guilty one. Plus, I think Cade would cheerfully slit my throat in a dark alley regardless of my relationship with you, so this just gave him a really handy excuse to go on a hate rampage with my face.”

“Maybe you should get a tissue. Or a drop cloth. You’re sort of having your own personal plague of blood coming out your nose.”

He looked down at his arm and winced. “Yeah.”

“He’s an ass.” She brushed a tear from her cheek, her shoulders shaking.

“Hey.” He put his hand on her cheek. “Are you okay?”

“No,” she said, her voice thick. “I’m not. I wanted to . . . have this and not have them know. I wanted to make a grand gesture without actually having to face any consequences for it.”

“You could have gone with them.”

She shook her head. “No. I couldn’t. But I have to . . . I have to make my own decisions. My own mistakes. They have to let me someday. Today’s a good day to start.”

“Fair enough,” he said, his chest tightening when she said the word mistake.

“I can’t believe he did that to you,” she said, wiping a tear from her cheek.

“Okay, I don’t like your brother, let’s get that straight right now.”

“It wasn’t unclear to me, ever, how you felt about Cade,” she said.

“Yeah, well. I’m making sure you know. I don’t like him. But in his position? I probably would have done the same thing.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. And my sister is older.”

“So you’re all sexist asshats who think women can’t make their own decisions?”

“No. We’re brothers. We’re protective. Right or wrong. Double standard or not.”

“It’s not fair.”

“Fair doesn’t come into it. It’s all gut-level emotion, which isn’t exactly logical.”

“You haven’t really talked a lot about your brother and sister,” she said.

“I didn’t know we were sharing personal stuff,” he said.

“Uh . . . my brother just got all up in your grill, and you know my dirtiest family secret. Do you need any more? Cade used to wet the bed; it’s true. Oh, and because of some old debts that I’m now certain are connected to my dad, we’ve been struggling financially.”

“Really?”

“Well, we have money, but getting enough cash flow to keep the ranch going has been tough. The only thing bailing our asses out are the new contracts Cade helped get us for providing stock to the Rodeo Association. There. I shared. I shared dirty personal stuff. Spill your secrets, Parker.”

He tried not to let that thought linger in his mind, tried not to weigh the significance of it. Of what it could mean for him. Of how he could use it.

He looked at Lark instead. At the sincerity on her face. At the concern in her eyes. Even while she was in her own personal hell, she was worried about him.

“Follow me to the bathroom so I can mop my blood up and I’ll tell you.” He blinked, and a pain shot through the bone in his nose up to his forehead. Then he started toward the bathroom.

Lark closed the lid on the toilet and sat, watching him as he stood at the sink and cleaned the blood off of his arms.

“How many brothers?”

“Two,” he said. “One sister. All older. All blond. Pale.” He looked up at the mirror, at his busted-up face and brown eyes. “They all have blue eyes too,” he added.

“So you don’t belong.”

“No. And I know why.”

“Your dad.”

“Yes, the man who fathered me. I don’t actually have a dad. Not the man I was raised to call that, and not the man whose genes I share. It’s funny, because I still consider my mother’s husband to be my dad. He’s who I think of when I hear the word.”

“Have you met your real father?”

He nodded slowly, still looking in the mirror. “For about thirty seconds.”

The front door to the modest track house had opened to reveal a shocked-looking man. A man with eyes that matched his own.

“He told me to go away,” Quinn said. “Because his real family couldn’t find out about me.” He looked down at the sink, at the bloody water running down the drain. “That’s the story of my life, really. I was a bomb. Talking about me too much, or in the case of my real father, acknowledging me at all, would have blown up people’s lives. My mother’s husband pretended not to know so that he didn’t cause a scandal. My mother pretended I didn’t exist. That she’d never had her moment of insanity. I’m this thing they made that doesn’t fit anywhere in their lives.”

She stood up and walked behind him, reaching around his body and putting her hands beneath the water. Then she put her palm on his forearm and slid it over his skin, over the blood that was still there.

“You fit, Quinn. You fit with me.” She moved her hand to his jaw and removed the blood there too. “You fit in me.”

“Not at first.”

“Well, you do now. Turn and face me.” He did. She grabbed a hand towel from the rack by the sink and wetted it, smoothing it over his face. “I’ve never gotten to take care of anyone before. Everyone’s always taking care of me.”

This felt weird. Wrong. Because it felt so right. Because it made his heart feel like it was too big for his chest. Like he could stand there, in the tiny bathroom, forever, with his face bleeding and Lark Mitchell taking care of him.

It didn’t feel like a couple weeks. It didn’t feel temporary.

But it was. Nothing would change that fact.

“Well,” he said. “No one ever took care of me, so . . .” He cleared his throat. “I kind of like it.”

“Yeah, well, don’t make a habit of this.”

“I used to,” he said. “Make a habit of getting the shit beat of me.”

“What changed?”

“The rodeo. I got serious about it. I won’t say I stopped being a drunk jackass the minute I got into the circuit, but it started easing then. Having a goal gave me a purpose.” He winced. “I was a better fighter then, or maybe alcohol just made me think I was. Ten foot tall and bulletproof. I miss the feeling a little bit today.”

“We could go get a drink.”

“Nah. I can’t.”

“Off the ranch,” she said.

He shook his head, for some reason a little embarrassed to make his next admission. “I don’t drink anymore. At all.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I . . . I don’t know if I was an alcoholic; I wasn’t drinking all day. But I was more prone to being an ass when I was drunk, and I got drunk pretty much every night. That started early on. I got a DUI when I was sixteen. Kinda kept up with the drinking through my early twenties. In bars, so I would say, ‘Yeah, well, I’m not drinking alone,’ like that made it okay. Then one day I was hungover before a big ride. I fell off the damn horse and into the dirt almost before he was out of the gate. I didn’t feel so bulletproof right then. I looked like a fool. I felt like one. I lost the event. I never drank again. Eight years sober.”

“The circuit really changed you.”

“Yes, it did. For the better. Being without it seems to be bringing out the worst in me.”

Lark’s hands shook while she kept dabbing at the blood on Quinn’s face. She was so angry. So beyond angry that Cade had hit him. That Quinn hadn’t fought back. Even while knowing she would have been mad at Quinn if he had fought back.

“And in Cade,” she said.

“He thinks I stole what he loves,” Quinn said, his dark eyes intent on hers. She didn’t know if he meant the rodeo or her.

“But you didn’t,” she said. Either way, it was true. Because she was going to be left without Quinn in a few weeks, and she didn’t believe that Quinn had done anything to hurt Cade.

Not the man she knew. The man who had been consumed with guilt after taking her virginity. The man who cared so much about her satisfaction. The man who’d drawn her a bath and cleaned up her blood. Like she was doing for him now.

The man who had been rejected by everyone who was supposed to love him.

That man wasn’t perfect, but she had no trouble believing him now when he said he hadn’t done anything to Cade.

Which was why, as much as it hurt to know she’d made Cade feel betrayed, she’d stayed. Because he didn’t deserve their hate. He didn’t deserve the consequences he was living. As much as she ached to go with her brothers, too much of her was with Quinn. Walking away was impossible. It shouldn’t be, but it was.

“You’re so sure?” he asked.

“My brother just beat the sassy out of you with his fists, and you didn’t do anything about it.”

“Fighting is stupid.”

“And so is cheating. So is cheating when the cost is going to be worth so much more than the gain. You’re not a stupid man, are you, Quinn?”

He leaned in, and she looked at his nose. At the purplish bruising spreading from the bridge and down beneath his eyes. “I might be. I think this . . . us . . . it’s probably kind of stupid.”

“Well, thanks,” she said, her next stroke of the wash cloth over his skin a little bit too hard. “Should I be glad to be your moment of stupidity?”

“I’m your big mistake, aren’t I?”

“Fair enough. And next time please don’t let my brother use your face as a punching bag.”

“Next time?”

“Well, you know, yeah. Can you imagine how dead you would be if he’d caught us on the table?”

Quinn laughed, a humorless sound. “The authorities would be scouring the woods for bits of my bones.”

“They’re so stupid. Like I didn’t have a choice. Like I didn’t drive here myself.” She knew it wasn’t that simple. She knew they thought that Quinn had nearly killed Cade, and in the beginning, she had too.

But not now.

She’d known it, deep down, probably since that night in his truck. Because he just wasn’t the villain he’d been made out to be. Sure, he was rough, but he wasn’t the bad guy in the story. She just knew.

Maybe . . . maybe she could make them see.

“Lark, you’re going to have to make up with them eventually.”

“Like when you leave?”

He shrugged. “If you want to leave it that long.”

A wave of embarrassment hit her. “Sorry, I realize you didn’t offer to let me stay here, and that’s sort of what all this . . . sounds like. Like I’m inviting myself.”

“Hey, I wouldn’t complain about having you here. But we do have a bunch of teenage boys staying, so it just can’t be too obvious you’re sleeping with me.”

“Setting a good moral example?”

He snorted, then winced. “Hell no. I’m incapable of that. But it would go one of two ways. Either they’d see you were with me and leave you alone for fear I’d squash their heads like grapes if they touched you, or they would see that you were a woman engaging in a sexual relationship and decide you were game for them.”

“Oh.”

“In which case they’d find their hoodlum asses sent back to where they came from. I can take a lot. If they want to cuss and yell and generally be horrible snots for a while, fine. But if they disrespect any of the women here—you or anyone else—it’s over.”