Risk (Gentry Boys #2) (5 page)

I’d forgotten there was anyone else even home until I let go of the last note.  I looked up to see Saylor standing quietly nearby. 

“Your namesake,” she said, smiling faintly. 

I’d been singing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s
‘Long as I Can See the Light’
.  I knew their whole catalog by heart. 

I put the guitar down as Saylor came around and sat on the couch.  She played with a piece of her hair and seemed to be thinking. 

“Sorry about earlier,” I said. 

“I know,” she answered.  “And I shouldn’t get into your business.  It’s just, I don’t have many friends.  I like Truly.  I don’t want to see her get hurt.” 

“You think I’d hurt her?”

She looked at me frankly.  “I’m not sure you can help it, Creed.” 

“It was just one night, Saylor.  That’s all it’s gonna be.  If you have to know, she didn’t seem too eager to have me hanging around longer than necessary.” 

Saylor coughed once.  “I feel kind of bad.  I’m the one who pushed her out the door and told her to have a good time.” 

I leaned back into the couch.  “She did.  She had a great time.” 

Say laughed through her nose.  She looked at me for a long moment and then her gaze fell on the tattoo scripted across my chest.  “You think that’ll ever change?”

I looked down.  The tattoo read
‘Concedo nulli’. 
Translation: ‘Yield to no one’. 

“Doubt it,” I answered honestly. 

I heard a buzzing noise and Say pulled her phone out of her pocket.  She glanced at the screen and then looked quickly at me.  I could guess who was calling. 

I got off the couch and rested the guitar against the wall. 

“I’ll leave you to it,” I told her, heading for the back patio.  I knew she was waiting until I was out of earshot before answering her phone. 

I picked up some of the free weights we kept on the patio and started pumping sets of fifty.  Usually it wasn’t a problem.  It was an easy way to push myself out of the funk and get focused.  I would channel everything into my body’s rising strength.  It pleased me to feel myself growing more powerful with every lift.  It meant I had a shot at battling through whatever challenge was on the horizon.  I used to beg for that power when I was a kid as my brothers and I hid in the desert darkness from the same monster.  He still haunted us all, just in different ways.  I always figured the stronger I became the more defeated he would be.  The mind doesn’t always listen to those arguments though.

After ten minutes I set the weights down and stood.   Arizona in August is a punishing place.   The sweat rolled out of my pores and instantly evaporated in the searing heat.  I couldn’t hear Saylor’s voice.  I wondered if she was still talking to Truly, and what Truly had said about me. 

Strangely enough, I would have given a lot just then to know the answer. 

TRULY

I jumped out of bed the moment I heard Creed close the door.  For a few minutes I didn’t do anything but pace back and forth naked.  Dolly crept into the room and stared at me warily from the doorway.  I thought I detected a note of disapproval in her bright eyes. 

“I know,” I told the cat.  “There’s nothing you can say about it that I’m not already thinking so you may as well keep your rude scolding to yourself.” 

The cat blinked. 

With an incoherent shout I dropped back onto the bed.  I leaned over my bare knees and stared at my toes. 

I had fucked Creed Gentry.

Holy shit, I fucked Creed Gentry!!! 

Repeatedly.  In more ways than were decent.  And he was so good I couldn’t even wrap my head around it. 

With a groan I flopped back into the log cabin quilt I had sewn by hand when I was fifteen.   I’d dragged that poor thing through my manic life until we wound up here.  Now I’d forced it to suffer the indignity of hosting a big fat fuck party with a surly bad boy I scarcely knew. 

Dolly jumped on the bed and curled up close to my face.  I nuzzled her dark fur as she purred.  She came into my life a year ago, when I was fresh out of a bad deal with a man who figured I was young enough and stupid enough to accept being a kept woman.  I knew better, although it took me a little while to realize I knew better.  I wasn’t about to stomach becoming something only slightly classier than a street walker.  By that point I’d been in Arizona for about four months but that was a block of time mostly spent entertaining Paul Angelo.  He was twice my age and absurdly possessive.  He also had a wife and kids who knew nothing of my stained existence in a luxurious Phoenix loft.  When I found that out I realized how much I’d been kidding myself about my own status.  I told him where to get off and then I got out, refusing the pile of money he tried to throw at me.

At the time I only had enough cash to rent a tiny trailer in a crowded Mesa park. By then I was living in isolation.  Friends were a myth.  Family was a half remembered dream.  A few of the folks ambling around the trailer park seemed sketchy, dangerous.  But mostly they were just ordinary people; a little lost and yet still hopeful, kind of like me.

Dolly was a skeletal wraith who ran like the devil every time a human came within twenty yards.  Something in her watchful eyes and undernourished body tore at me.  I started setting out a plate of milk every evening and sitting nearby as I waited for her to find it.  After the fourth night of patiently holding out my hand she finally ventured close enough to touch.   Her rough little tongue gently swiped my knuckles and I casually pulled her into my lap.  When I took her inside I wasn’t sure she would stay.  But she did.  Maybe she recognized a kindred spirit, an allied stray to face the world with.  After a few months I was able to clear enough money from waitressing jobs to get out of the trailer park and into a shared apartment close to the university.

I listened to the swift beat of Dolly’s heart for a few minutes before sighing and rising from the bed.  I was damn glad Stephanie was still out of town.  We weren’t close and Stephanie Bransky struck me as someone who suffered from an excess of intensity.  When she wasn’t running off to class she was holed up in front of her computer or barking into her phone. It all seemed mysterious and exhausting. I’d asked her once what the hell she was up to but her flat expression said she had no intention of talking about it.  Stephanie didn’t bring men home.  She probably wouldn’t have approved of Creedence Gentry. 

The shower felt good after so many hours of sweaty exertion.  As I pulled the worn terrycloth robe over my skin and wrung out my hair, I started to feel like less of a basket case.  I’d had a one night stand.  So what?   People did that all the time.  It’s not like Creed would think less of me.  I doubted he would think of me again at all. 

Even though I hadn’t slept much the night before I wasn’t tired.  Hours remained until I needed to return to the restaurant.  Dolly stayed under my feet while I headed to the kitchen and whipped up some scrambled eggs.  I hadn’t exactly been honest when I told Creed I never cooked. 

With a plate in hand I walked into the living room.  It was my plan to vegetate in front of the television until the striking memory of Creed’s naked body began to fade.  Dolly bumped into my ankles when I stopped cold. There, in the middle of the beige carpeted floor, was the crumpled shape of a man’s shirt.  I remembered thinking last night how the blue fabric brought out the color of his eyes.  I leaned over slowly and picked it up.  Why the hell hadn’t he taken his shirt with him?  He couldn’t have overlooked it; it was out here in plain sight.  Maybe he left it behind intentionally, as a reason to come back later. 

Even though I felt supremely foolish, I set my plate down and picked up the shirt, bringing it to my face.  I inhaled the essence of smoke, soap, and a basic male musk that caused all my female parts to shriek with longing. 

Goddamn he was good. 

I shook my head and tossed the shirt on the couch.  Dolly immediately jumped on top of it and began kneading the fabric into a bed. 

“You too, huh?” I grumbled as she settled comfortably in the middle of the bed she had created. 

I picked up my plate full of eggs but I wasn’t really hungry anymore.  After getting free of the Paul situation I had come to a long overdue epiphany; I’d keep blowing around the country like a damn tumbleweed unless I stopped clinging to men in search of something I would never have.  Before Paul there’d been the minor league baseball player who I could never run fast enough to keep up with.  That phase was a long string of cheap motels and drunken sex that never managed to get me satisfied.  

For a while I’d also taken up space on the tour bus of an obscure band.  It was a time that followed a particular low point in my life.  But strangely, that rowdy environment full of colorful souls had helped heal me a little when I desperately needed some healing. I was still trying to escape the consequences of the first and most damaging chapter of my sad history with men.  It was the disaster that had torn the Lee girls apart; something that destitution, despair and the constant selfishness of an irresponsible parent had failed to do.  It was my mother calling me a thousand foul things. It was my screaming answers, exposing too many terrible truths.  It couldn’t be taken back.  On the night I left, the man who had caused all the agony was nowhere to be found.

If Laura Lee ever thought of her eldest daughter she never made it known.  My sisters were beautiful in their grief the last time I hugged them goodbye.  Mia.  Aggie.  Carrie.  I missed them. 

We had been the Lee girls, all taking the last name of our only known parent.  Over a span of four years my mother had been a baby factory accepting donations of diverse sperm.  She chose our first names based on whatever area of the South happened to be nearby when we came screaming out of her womb.  I, Tallulah Rae Lee, was born when she was nineteen. Fourteen months later came Meridian, who resembled our mother the most.  She had the same pale frailty and seemed even more destined to be wounded by the world.  The following year brought Augusta whose dark complexion guaranteed that heartless people would be forever asking if she was really one of us.  Finally my youngest sister, Carolina, came rolling out armed with willful demands that never subsided. 

My mother dragged us throughout the darkest corners of the deep South and it was a wonder we even learned to read.  We lived off charity until it was exhausted in a particular place and then we moved on.  There was never money for anything and our clothes were always some other child’s cast offs.  I’d learned to sew early on so that what little we had could be adjusted to make us into something presentable. 

Strangely, I didn’t remember my childhood as being terrible.  Sometimes I was hungry and sometimes I was cold, but there was always the warmth of family.  My sister Augusta, nicknamed Aggie, two years younger, was like my other half.  We were a determined team overseeing the survival of the Lee women. 

I saw the disbelief in Aggie’s eyes that terrible night when I packed a garbage bag full of everything I owned. Mia and Carrie were trying to hold my mother back to keep her from hitting me again.  It was the first time she had ever done so.  That only made it more awful. 

“Tru,” Aggie had reached for me, her voice choked.  But I could only clutch her briefly before leaving that chaos behind. 

Except for Carrie, who was in her last year of high school and had managed a scholarship to a highbrow boarding school, my sisters were grown now, scattered.  We were rarely in contact.  It was always Aggie’s tragic face that haunted me most when I thought of those final moments all of us were together.  I knew she didn’t understand then.  And it was too late to explain it now. 

My hand went, reflexively, to the place where I knew a faint scar hid beneath the fabric of my robe.  It was the most important thing there was to know about me.  It was the thing I hadn’t spoken of to anyone. 

I’m sorry, Aggie. I left you alone with it all.  But I had to. 

With a deep sigh I turned on the television.  After flipping the channels for a few moments I came across a talk show featuring a bunch of expensive-looking women sitting around a table.  They sipped wine and talked about buying purses that cost more than the amount of my weekly paycheck.  I stared at them, wondering where in the hell people like that came from.  Had everything always been pretty for them?  Or were their bright smiles and costly accessories masking some hidden ugliness? 

I turned the television off, trying to throw off my sense of gloom.  It wasn’t my natural frame of mind.  There were voices outside.  Most of the local residents were students.  Weekday mornings involved a parade of bicycles headed for the university.  I’d finally taken the high school equivalency test over a year ago when I was staying in Texas.  At least once a week I took that piece of paper out and stared at it even though I knew it was nothing special.  Hell, almost everyone managed to graduate from high school somehow.  Maybe that’s why it meant so much to me.  It was a symbol of a normal life.  Someday I would love to be among the crowd rushing to class. 

All the attempts to distract myself were no good.  In the middle of my thoughts I shifted position on the couch and felt a faint soreness between my legs.  That was all it took to knock the wind out of me as I recalled all the vivid reasons why I was sore.  Although Creed had been ruthless in his quest for pleasure he gave back everything he got.  I’d never been with a man who was so intent on getting me to the peak and got even more aroused every time I came.  Maybe I should have accepted his offer to take me out to breakfast. 

Stop!  It was one night.  That’s all a man like Creed will ever want.

I wondered if he was home right now high fiving his brothers and describing the fruits of a successful hunt.  Then I wondered if Saylor was completely disgusted with me for screwing her boyfriend’s brother.  That thought was the most depressing of all.  Saylor was really the only friend I had.  It was painful to realize she might be thinking badly of me. 

A glance at the clock told me it was after ten.  She should be awake by now. Creed lived in the same three bedroom apartment with Saylor, Cord and Chase so even if she hadn’t seen us take off together last night she would have found out about it by now. Reluctantly I pulled my phone out of my purse and called her.  She didn’t answer until the fourth ring. 

“Truly!” 

“Hi Say.  Look, sorry I ditched you at The Hole.” 

Her voice rose.  “What?  Who gives a shit about that!  Are you all right?”

I raised my eyebrows.  She sounded panicked.  What on earth did she think happened last night?  “Uh, yeah.  I’m fine.”

There was the sound of a door closing on the other end.  I figured Saylor might have retreated to a place where Creed couldn’t hear her talking.  

“I was just worried,” she said gently.  “When Chase told us you’d gone home with Creed I couldn’t believe it.  I mean, I never would have figured you’d go for him.”

“Me either,” I muttered. 

“Damn, I feel bad.  I’m the one who pushed you to go out last night and I know you’re not the type to go bed hopping.”

“It’s not your fault, Say.  I’m a grown ass woman.  It might not have been one of the top ten wisest things I’ve ever done but it was totally my choice.”

Saylor seemed to relax a little.  “I gave Creed some crap when he walked through the door this morning.  I don’t like that he’d treat you like any old girl.” 

I bit my lip, wondering if I should ask the next question.  “Was he laying out his bragging rights?”

“Nah, Creed doesn’t brag.  He just does what he does and expects everyone to be cool with it.” 

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Cool with it.  I mean, I could have picked someone other than Cord’s brother.” 

Saylor laughed.  “Look, I grew up with these boys.  I know what kind of impact they’ve always had on females everywhere.  Brayden used to shake his head and say ‘It’s a Gentry world.  The rest of us only live in it.’”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t blame you one bit for taking up with Creed.” 

I twisted the belt of my robe and opened the patio blinds.  The sun hurt my eyes.  “I’m not exactly taking up with him.  We had a night.”