Set the Dark on Fire (18 page)

From the dark parking lot, she could hear the sound of shuffling feet on loose gravel, followed by a sharp knock and a heavy thud.

Shay and Clay, along with a few others, rushed out to see what had happened. Jesse was laid out on the ground, dead to the world. Luke stood over him, rubbing the knuckles on his right hand. He glanced up at the growing crowd. “He was resisting.”

Clay smiled, and everyone formed a circle around Jesse. Shay let out the breath she’d been holding, feeling shaky.

“Are you all right?” Luke asked, taking her by the elbow.

“Yeah, I was just … worried.”

Luke shrugged, looking down at Jesse’s prone form. “He’ll be fine.”

“Not about him, you idiot.”

Luke gave her an incredulous stare. “You were worried about me? He was drunk. And I’m bigger than he is.”

“He doesn’t always fight fair,” she murmured.

“So you thought you’d help me out by putting yourself between us? That was stupid, Shay. You could have been hurt.”

“I was trying to defuse the situation,” she said through clenched teeth. “Next time I’ll just let him have at you.”

“Good,” he said, as if he was looking forward to it.

Shay rolled her eyes heavenward.

The waitress brought Jesse an ice pack, cradling it against his jaw, and the rest of the patrons wandered back inside, deciding the show was over.

“You still want to arrest him?” Clay asked.

Luke deliberated, probably thinking Jesse wasn’t worth the trouble.

“We have a drunk tank on the rez,” Clay offered. “I could take him there for the night.”

“Thanks,” Luke said, nodding his agreement. “I’d like to ask him a few questions when he sobers up.”

They loaded him up in the passenger seat of Clay’s pickup, which took a lot of effort because Jesse was like a ton of bricks. When Clay pulled out of the parking lot, Luke said, “Come on. I’ll take you home.”

Shay snapped out of the daze she’d been in since Luke had knocked Jesse’s lights out. Situations like this often made her feel … disconnected. “No thanks,” she said, heart thumping with fresh indignation. “I don’t need you.”

Freudian slip. She’d meant to say, I don’t need you
to
.

Luke’s eyes darkened. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

In the space of five minutes, he’d rejected her, called her stupid, and told her she was ridiculous. If Shay wanted to be treated like this, she could have stayed with Jesse. Too furious to utter another word, she turned on her heel and stomped away.

When she heard him coming after her, Shay made a fist with her right hand. She’d been pushed far enough for one evening. If he grabbed her arm, she was going to deck him.

He caught up with her easily, because her shoes weren’t made for wading through gravel, but he had the sense not to touch her. “What are you going to do now? Strut down Main Street like a—”

“Whore?” she said, throwing the ugly word back in his face. “Why not? That’s what you think I am.”

His mouth made an angry line, but he didn’t dispute her.

“You sanctimonious son of a bitch,” she said, stopping in her tracks. They were standing between parked cars now, his truck on her left side. “Haven’t you ever heard of saying no? If you didn’t want me—”

He moved so fast she didn’t have time to react. “Not want you?” he growled, wrapping his arm around her waist and bringing her body flush against his. “You know goddamned well how much I want you.”

Her hands, one clutching her silver purse, the other still clenched into a fist, rested on his shoulder, ready to push him away. Any second now.

“I’ve wanted you from the first moment I saw you. I just wasn’t interested in waiting in line to get to you.”

She gasped, shoving at his chest, but he brought her even closer to him, refusing to give her room to maneuver.

“You’re right,” he said, struggling to keep his hold on her. “I
am
a sanctimonious son of a bitch. I’ve judged you unfairly from the start, and I’m sorry.” His gaze moved from her trembling lips to her tousled hair. “I never thought you were a whore, but that first morning, you looked so … sexual. I assumed you’d been with a man the night before.”

Hot color flooded her cheeks. “You’re such a jerk. The only man I’ve been with in the past year is you.”

That statement gave him pause. “Really?”

“Yes. And I’m this close to kneeing you in the groin.” She held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart to demonstrate.

He loosened his grip by a margin, never taking his attention from her face. “At the time, I guess I was projecting my own thoughts onto you. Blaming you, because I wanted you so much I couldn’t control myself.”

Shay stared back at him, wavering.

“I still can’t,” he said, his eyes locked on her mouth. “I can’t stop thinking about the way you feel. I can’t stop remembering the way you taste.”

Tears blurred her vision, because she was in the same boat. How she wanted to hate him! But every time she looked at him, she felt … something else. “Damn you,” she whispered, lifting her lips to his.

With a low groan, he pressed her back against the side of the truck and covered her mouth with his, kissing her senseless. She dropped her purse and threw her arms around his neck. Their tongues met and tangled, hearts pounding, hands seeking. She threaded her fingers through the short hair at the nape of his neck and held on tight. It was the least graceful kiss of her life, and the most exciting. There was a lot of panting and groping and straining. Their bodies slammed into the passenger door. At one point, she may have bitten him.

When his hands found her bare bottom beneath her skirt and his button fly met the front of her thong panties, she whimpered. A little more friction and she’d explode. He put his lips to her throat and she moaned, wanting to wrap her legs around his waist and forget who she was, where they were … how he’d treated her.

The parking lot at the Round-Up had seen this kind of action before, but she hadn’t. Although Shay had made a lot of bad choices in her life, screwing a guy up against the side of a pickup truck in a public place wasn’t one of them.

“Stop,” she gasped, bracing her palms on his chest.

He paused, breathing hard against her neck. Slowly, reluctantly, he let his hands fall away from her.

Pushing her hair off her forehead, she bent down, retrieving her discarded, discount-quality metallic purse from the gravel at her feet. When she straightened, he was watching her, awaiting her decision. Feeling torn, she twisted the cheap fabric in her hands, wanting to tell him to go to hell.

“Take me to Dark Canyon,” she whispered instead, squaring her shoulders, meeting his eyes.

17

Dylan sat across from Angel, who was perched on the edge of his rumpled, unmade bed, and tried not to think about what they’d been doing the last time they were here together.

He was punchy from too little sleep and too much Mountain Dew, the muscles in his forearms ached from cleaning tools, and his brain was overloaded with the calc problems he would have to finish during lunch tomorrow. But his hormones were on full alert, proving he was never too tired to think about sex.

“My dad said you called.”

Oh. Right. Her reason for being here had nothing to do with jumping his bones. “Yeah,” he said, giving himself a mental shake. “It’s kind of important.”

“There’s no privacy at my house. I hope you don’t mind that I stopped by.”

“Of course not.” Clearing his throat, he told her about his interview with Luke Meza. Angel already knew about Yesenia Montes. Apparently, her dad had found the body.

“You told him I was there?” she asked, her eyes widening.

“No. Travis did.”

A crease formed between her brows. “That’s weird. You’d think he would want to keep that part quiet.”

Dylan shrugged. “I thought you should know, in case the sheriff came to question you.”

She studied him from beneath lowered lashes. “There’s another reason I came over.”

His heart rate kicked into overdrive. “Yeah?”

As she reached in her front pocket, he tried not to notice how snugly her jeans fit, or the way her tank top molded to her chest. Why was she wearing such figure-revealing clothes? Did she
like
torturing him?

“I was going to ask you something … and you can tell me to get lost, if you want to, but …” She let out a frustrated breath, running a hand through her hair. It was down around her shoulders tonight, a cascade of black silk. “Will you help me?”

He glanced down at the crumpled piece of paper in her other hand.

“If I ever summon up the nerve to send my song lyrics to a record label, no one will take me seriously.”

Dylan felt a stab of disappointment. He wanted to be her boyfriend, not her tutor. Although he’d looked up some information about learning disabilities at school today, he wasn’t all that interested in helping her. He was sick of being treated like a brain. Nor could he ignore the fact that she’d put him out like a wet dog last night, after moaning in his mouth and tangling her fingers through his hair.

“What about your brothers? Can’t they read?”

Her mouth thinned with hurt, which made him feel better and worse at the same time. “Juan Carlos used to help me out a lot,” she admitted, a faraway look on her face. “School was so easy for him.”

Dylan nodded, remembering her brother’s devious mind all too well. Juan Carlos had been almost too smart to get caught. Or perhaps getting caught had been his plan all along. He’d always wanted to leave Tenaja Falls. Right now he was probably running cons at juvenile hall, treating his counselors like marks.

“Daniel is a good student, but he’s only eight. And Ricardo can’t sit still to save his life. He’s almost as hopeless as I am.” When she ducked her head in embarrassment, her shame cut through him like a blade.

“Give it to me,” he said, holding out his hand.

Unable to meet his gaze, she shoved the paper at him. “I looked up some of the words in the dictionary, but I couldn’t find them all …”

Her handwriting was careful and deliberate, each letter painstakingly formed. She’d obviously put a lot of effort into refining her work, and although it was an improvement over the unintelligible jumble of symbols he’d seen last night, the lyrics still didn’t make sense. She’d switched some words and letters around, and omitted others altogether.

“Do you know what an article is?”

She frowned. “Like, in a newspaper?”

“No, like before a noun.” He pointed to the page. “Here you wrote ‘She took trip to no were.’ Do you mean ‘She took
a
trip to
nowhere
?”

Her lips trembled, but she nodded.

He couldn’t bear to go over every mistake. There were too many. “Just sing it to me,” he said, getting out a new sheet of paper. “I’ll rewrite it for you.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Fine.”

“Haven’t you ever been tested?”

“For what?”

“Learning disabilities. Dyslexia.”

Her shoulders stiffened. “You think I have that?”

“I don’t know.”

She deliberated for a moment, and said, “I started school late, and I was … very quiet. The teachers thought I was having trouble learning English as a second language. They kept me in ESL for five years.”

Dylan couldn’t hide his surprise, because he hadn’t known. They’d gone to the same elementary school, but she was a year ahead of him and they’d never had the same teachers.

“By the time I moved on to regular classes, Mama needed a lot of help at home. I was absent more and more, and able to follow along less and less. In high school, I couldn’t do anything without Juan Carlos. I never turned in my homework unless he rewrote it for me.”

He was floored by her admission. “That’s—crazy,” he sputtered. “You should have told someone. They could have helped you.”

Storm clouds gathered in her dark eyes. “Who could have helped me? The teachers who assumed I couldn’t speak English because of the way I look? The ones who kept passing me into the next grade even though I wasn’t ready? Or the ones who didn’t care if I got a good education because I’m just another poor Mexican girl, destined to end up barefoot and pregnant?”

He wasn’t indifferent to her plight, nor was he naïve enough to think teachers treated all of their students equally. Tenaja Falls was no Mecca of enlightenment.

And yet, her willingness to play the martyr rankled.

“But you do speak English,” he countered, “and you could have said so. If you didn’t get a decent education, you have only yourself to blame.”

Glaring at him, she crossed her arms over her chest, which made her breasts swell enticingly above the neckline of her top. If she hadn’t continued, he might have forgotten what they were discussing altogether. “I made
sacrifices,”
she hissed, “for my family. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

He pulled his gaze up to her face, too pissed off now to be distracted. “Why not? Because I have such an awesome home life?”

“No, because you’re incapable of thinking about anyone besides yourself.”

His jaw dropped. “That’s not tr—”

“Yes it is,” she said, jumping to her feet. He stood also, not about to let a short girl tower over him on his own turf. “You’re so angry about your mother dying and your father leaving that you can’t appreciate what you have.”

“I have nothing!” he protested, throwing his arms out at his sides. She need only look around his disaster area of a room to see the proof.

“You have everything,” she said, startling him with her vehemence. “You have the potential to be anything. You can leave this town and go wherever you want, do whatever you want, become whoever you want.” Her voice softened once again, growing irresistibly husky.

“Do you know what I would give to have that, just for a moment? To be able to look at words and numbers and just … understand?”

He stared back at her in silence, thinking his intellect was as much a curse as a gift. There was so much pressure on him to live up to his “potential.” What if he didn’t want to be all he could be? What if he’d rather blow up the world than make it a better place?

Sometimes he wished he was normal. A high IQ and straight-A average had never won him a date, or earned him any friends at school. Everyone treated him like a leper. Even his own family.

“Do you know what I would give to have what you have?” he asked.

“What do I have?”

“A dad who cares enough to stick around,” he said, swallowing past the lump in his throat. “And three brothers who would give their lives for you.”

She let out a flustered breath. “Please. My brothers treat me like a maid.”

“No. Juan Carlos jumped me once just for looking at you.”

His statement gave her pause. “Really? I don’t remember that.”

He laughed and rubbed the bridge of his nose, not about to elaborate on the incident. “It’s true. I had to be very careful about checking you out after that.”

The corner of her mouth tipped up. “You weren’t that careful.”

“You’re wrong,” he said, disagreeing quietly. “If I’d stared at you as often as I wanted to, I’d have been beaten down on a daily basis. And if he knew what I was imagining … he’d have killed me.”

Her smile disappeared. He didn’t think she was offended by his admission, but he didn’t fool himself into believing she was flattered. She’d hate him if she found out he’d seen her naked, and be disgusted by how many times he’d pleasured himself to that mental image. Dylan knew next to nothing about girls, but he was pretty sure they didn’t want to be jerked off to and treated like sex objects.

Feeling heat creep up his neck, he sat back down at his desk, taking a paper and pen in hand. “What’s the first line?”

She took a deep breath and sang the song again, her sexy, raspy voice vibrating down his spine like a silken caress, all the more effective a cappella. Her songwriting skills were impressive, but it was her singing that blew him away. The hairs on his arms stood up and every fiber of his being was aware of her, awakened by her, aroused by her.

As she finished the last verse, he gripped the pen so tightly that blood welled up from the fresh cut on his hand.

“What did you do to yourself?” she asked, wrapping her slender fingers around his wrist. Bringing his hand toward her, she laid it across her lap, palm up.

“Nothing,” he said, sounding hoarse. “It happened at work.”

“Work?”

“I got a job on the rez. Casino construction.”

Her lips parted in astonishment. “You didn’t.”

“I did,” he asserted, annoyed by her reaction.

“Oh, Dylan,” she murmured, making the same face Shay had. Concern and confusion, like he’d signed up for the front line in Iraq. “You’ll ruin your hands.”

“I’ll ruin my hands?” he repeated, angry and incredulous. “Who the fuck do you think I am, Itzhak Perlman?”

She flinched. “Who’s that?”

“Never mind,” he muttered, pulling away from her.

“You need a bandage.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Where’s the stuff? I’ll do it.” Undaunted by his attitude, she sashayed out of his room and into the bathroom, rifling through the medicine cabinet like she owned the place. “Ooh,” she said, examining a small spray canister. “Man perfume. Where do you put this?”

He shifted in his chair. “Come here and I’ll show you.”

She laughed and kept looking until she found some rubbing alcohol and a liquid bandage. Intent on coddling him as if he were one of her kid brothers, she sat down on his bed and brought his hand toward her once again. “I didn’t mean to imply that your hands are feminine,” she murmured, cleaning the cut with a square of moistened gauze.

He sucked in a sharp breath.

“They aren’t.” Leaning forward slightly, she lifted his hand to her mouth and blew, drying his skin.

If she’d put her face in his lap, his reaction couldn’t have been stronger. Who knew his palm was connected directly to his groin? One touch, and he was totally turned on.

“Does that hurt?” she said, lifting her head in surprise.

He realized he’d just groaned. “No,” he said, clearing his throat. “Are you kidding? It feels good.”

She rolled her eyes, thinking he was lying. “Don’t move,” she warned, applying a thin line of blue adhesive to the cut. When she lowered her head again, her soft breath fanning his skin, he held himself motionless, caught between exquisite pleasure and mild pain.

Dude
. What a time to find out he was a masochist.

His excitement was impossible to miss; and the sudden tension in the room, difficult to ignore. She straightened abruptly, her gaze flying to his face. “I’m—sorry,” she stuttered, dropping his hand like it was hot.

He clenched his jaw, disinclined to apologize for something he had so little control over. She knew he wanted her. If she was shocked that
blowing
on him got him all worked up, that was just too damned bad. He hadn’t asked her to come over here and tease him.

But she didn’t look shocked, any more than she’d looked offended when he admitted to entertaining impure thoughts about her. If anything, she seemed kind of … curious.

“Do you enjoy this?” he asked, an edge in his voice.

She moistened her lips. Her eyes had this smoky glaze to them, a dark heat he wanted to sink into. “Enjoy what?”

“Getting me hard? Having me lust after you?”

“No, I …” She trailed off, an almost indiscernible blush tainting her cheeks. On her, embarrassment looked delicious. “I enjoy being … desired. But I don’t like your anger.”

He wondered, and not for the first time, if her past experiences had caused her to be confused about her sexuality. Hell, he was confused about his, and he didn’t even have any past experiences. Maybe she was afraid of him. Maybe she just wasn’t ready.

He was more than ready, so ready he was about to explode. Even so, if she’d hinted that she wanted to pursue something romantic, rather than sexual, he’d have given her all the time she needed. Instead, she was gazing up at him with those sultry black eyes and “kiss me” lips, sending signals even the horniest kid in the world couldn’t misinterpret.