Luke: A West Bend Saints Romance (13 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Autumn

Olivia points at the freezer, and then at her mouth, before letting out a loud scream.

"Ice cream?" I ask.  I'm about to say no, when Connie – Connie C. to differentiate her from Connie S. over at the salon -- bustles past me, wiping her hands on her gingham apron.

"Oh, give that baby some ice cream," she says, slipping behind the ice cream freezer and reaching into one of the containers to scoop out a bit into a cup.  "It won't hurt her any."

"Says the woman who doesn't have to deal with a kid who doesn't want to nap after she gets all hopped up on sugar."  I protest, but half-heartedly.  This is part of our regular routine here.

Connie C. laughs.  "You sound like my daughter when I get around the grandkids," she says.  "Here you go, little Olivia."

"I swear, I think she's associated you with ice cream, Connie," I say, holding the cup while Olivia tries to spoon some into her mouth, the liquid dripping down her chin.

"There are worse things to be associated with," she says.  "How's business, Autumn?  That fire up there didn't hurt your harvest now, did it?"

"Not terribly," I tell her.  "We caught it in time.  We're actually almost finished harvesting."

"Luke Saint has been helping you out, I hear."  She slips behind the counter and begins placing my groceries in the paper bags, but I know she's really sussing me out for juicy gossip.  I force my expression blank.  Connie is one of the worst gossips in town – her general store and the local hair salon are the two main sources of information in West Bend, and everyone knows it.  And the last thing I need is for her to get the idea that there's anything other than a business relationship going on between Luke and I.

I haven't talked to Luke since we hooked up.  No phone call, no text, no Luke knocking on my front door with groceries in his hands and that crooked grin on his face.

Nothing.

"Yep," I say.  No elaboration.  "Do you have any of that French bread you had before?"

"Oh, it's in the back, sweetie," she says, putting a head of broccoli in a bag.  "Hang on, I'll grab you a loaf."

I exhale, relieved at the brief reprieve from Connie's questions.  And from thinking about Luke.

At least, that's the case until he walks in the door.

Luke is wearing jeans and a t-shirt that looks like it was dyed to match the color of his eyes, a cornflower blue hue that's warm and icy at the same time.  When Olivia sees him, she holds up her spoon and grunts, waving it in the air excitedly and sending droplets of ice cream all over the floor.  He looks at me for a good long moment, then down at Olivia.  "Hey there, Olivia," he says.  "That looks like some delicious ice cream."

When he looks up at me, his eyes look tired, dark circles underneath, and his face is wan.  "Hey, Red."

"Grocery shopping?" I ask brightly. 
Too brightly,
I think, clearing my throat.
Be casual,
I tell myself. 
Be cool.
  Like I do this all the time, hook up with someone and then, you know, act like a big asshole.

"Just popped in for a couple of things," he says, glancing behind me.  He looks uncomfortable.

"I -- uh, wanted to say something, Luke," I start.  My heart thumps loudly in my throat, so loudly I swear he has to be able to hear it in the room.  I wipe my palms on my jeans.  Why are my damn palms so sweaty?

Just apologize to him, Autumn,
I tell myself.

"Oh yeah," he says, distracted.  "Don't worry about it, you know?  I haven't given it a second thought."

Oh.
  Not a second thought.  I feel like someone punched me in the gut.

"Here you go, dear," Connie says.  "Luke Saint.  Well, there, speak of the devil.  Did you feel your ears burning?  We were just talking about you no more than thirty seconds ago, now weren't we, Autumn?"

If my face could flush any darker, I'd be the color of an eggplant.  I look out of the corner of my eye at Luke, but the expression on his face is unreadable.  This is the kind of thing he'd usually be prepared for with a quip, some kind of wisecrack to embarrass me even more.

Oh God.
  He must hate me that much, that he doesn't even care to be a smartass about it.  I have thoroughly fucked things up.

"No, uh--" I stammer.  "We weren't talking about you, I don't think..."

"I was just asking about how you were helping her out at the orchard," Connie says.

"And I was just telling her that I was grateful for your help," I say, my voice curt.

Luke nods, his expression drawn.  "Yes," he says, looking at his watch.  "I'll, see you at the orchard on Monday, then."

I swallow hard, watching Luke's back as he walks about the door, trying to stifle the uneasy feeling I get in my stomach as he leaves. 
It's just a casual fling,
I tell myself.

"Well, now," Connie says, eyeing me as she slides the loaf of bread into my shopping bag, "he turned around and left without even getting what he came in here for."

"Yes," I say, my head swimming.  He obviously didn’t like what he saw in the store.

"He's a good-looking one, that Luke Saint is," she says, clucking.  "All of the brothers are.  Damn shame about that family, though."

"Shame about what?" I ask, still looking at the door, as if I can will Luke turn around and come back into the store.

"Oh, you wouldn't know because you haven't been around here long enough, have you, honey?" she asks, shaking her head.  "The father was a real son of a – well, you know – never treated those kids right.  Mother wasn't that much better.  Real pretty, though.  Killed herself after the father died."

"That's terrible," I say.  June has already told me about their parents' deaths, but now all I can think about is that scar on Luke's back and what it means about the kind of hell he's lived through.

"It's an odd thing, though," she says.

"What is?"

Connie shrugs, her brow furrowed.  "It's just that she stayed with him all those years, you know?  If that were me, and that man died, I'd take his stuff out into the street and have a celebration.  Roast marshmallows over the bonfire."

"That is odd," I say.  "I guess you never really know about people, do you?"

I begin to wonder about how Luke is dealing with his mother's death, but I don't get a chance to think about it for more than a second before Connie pushes a flyer across the counter at me.  "You get one of those offers on your property?" she asks.

I glance down at the paper advertising a town hall meeting.  "I did," I say.  "Told them I wasn't interested."

"It's thirty-four ninety-two for the groceries," she says, tapping her finger on the paper.  "You should come to this.  People in town, they like you.  Respect you.  June too."

"Me?" I ask.  "I've only lived here a couple of years."

"No, but they know your cider," she says.  "And you're a businesswoman.  Educated.  They know you told the mining company no, too.  You should tell them why."

"I don't know," I tell her.  "I said no for personal reasons, not political ones."

"Well, I've heard there's been some shady business with some folks out here," Connie says.  "People who've told them no and had problems after that."

"What?" I ask, but someone enters the store, interrupting us, and Connie is off, doing something else.  I stuff the flyer in my grocery bag, pick up Olivia, who's only partially covered in ice cream, and head outside.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Luke

This town is the smallest place in the damn world.  I wasn't prepared to run into Autumn and Olivia in the general store yesterday.  I wasn't ready to see them.  I was getting some space – and some beers – after reading that damn diary.  I didn't want them to see me like that, and I did the only thing I knew to do to keep this shit away from them, and that was to walk away.

That damn diary.

Page after page of excruciating detail.  I read the whole thing, driven by my need to understand why the hell she did what she did.  I’m not even sure my brothers read the entire thing.  They paged through what they needed to, and handed it over to me, glad to be rid of it.

I expected it to be filled with depressed ramblings about life or something – except it wasn't.  Instead, she confesses to killing my father.

That should have made me feel happy.  She finally grew some balls and killed the asshole.  Except it just made me angry at her.  After all that time, all those years of her beating her to a bloody pulp…  Fuck, all those times he beat the shit out of us in front of her, she did nothing.

I'd always thought of her as being weak.

It turns out that she wasn't weak at all.  Protecting her kids just wasn't enough incentive for her to get rid of him.  But money was.

She wasn't weak; she was greedy.

The journal laid out everything – starting when my father discovered europium in the illegal old mine back behind the house where we grew up.  He'd brought a sample to the geology teacher down at the high school where my father worked as a janitor.  When the geology teacher found out what it was, he'd gone to a mining company he thought would be interested – and was bought off.  And after the mining company started buying properties in West Bend, with the wheels greased by the town sheriff and the mayor, my father thought he was going to get rich.  He'd gotten drunk and bragged to my mother about the life they were going to have.

It turns out that my mother already had a life that didn't involve him.  She was having an affair with the senior Jed Easton – the fucking mayor of West Bend.

It also turns out that she had more balls than any of us would have ever thought.

She hit my asshole father in the head with a rock.  Since he was a drunk and no one gave a shit whether he lived or died, it was ruled an accidental death.  But my mother wanted him silenced so she could get the payout.  And she didn't simply want to sell the property to the mining company.

As it turns out, my mousy, asked-for-nothing-our-entire-life, never-voiced-her-opinion mother wanted more than that.  She wanted a kickback from Jed and the Mayor, money to buy her silence.  She was going to blow the whole thing wide open, everything going on the town – her affair with the Mayor, the fact that he and Jed were dirty as fuck, the mining company’s scam to scoop up properties from town residents at a price that was less than fair.

She was stupid and greedy.

And that’s why she died.

Before, I felt sorry for her.  I’d felt sorry for her my whole life.  I imagined her as a victim, the much-too-young wife of my asshole father, too spineless to leave him, too beat-down by life to be more than just a punching bag.

Except she wasn’t.

She simply didn’t think protecting us was important enough to consider leaving him.  As it turned out, money was the catalyst for that.

When I went into the general store yesterday, I was fucking reeling from the realization.  And when I saw Autumn and Olivia, I had to get away from them as quickly as I could.  They're everything that's good, everything that's light, everything that's perfect.  And my bullshit – all of this darkness – would just taint them.

Yesterday at the general store, I was going to tell her to get lost.  I was going to hurt her, say something terrible to push her away from me.  That's what I should have done.  It would be the honorable thing.  My family's shit -- my history – isn’t the kind of thing she and Olivia should be exposed to.

Instead, I was weak yesterday.  I stood there, wrestling with the part of me that should let her go, never see her again.  But I couldn't bring myself to do it.

And even worse?  Now I'm here.  I'm sitting here in my truck, outside of her house, at seven in the morning, as if it's a normal day and I'm about to go to work.

As if nothing happened between us.

As if everything is exactly the same.

I'm sitting here, debating whether to back out of her driveway, go down the road, and turn around.  I could do it.  I could drive away and never look back.  I could put this entire town in my rearview mirror, leave everything in this world behind.  I could leave behind this shit with my family, with my mother and Jed and West Bend, just the way Killian did, going back to the oil rig.

It would be entirely justifiable.

Autumn would understand.  After all, she did the same thing once before.  She left Kentucky without a backward glance.

She expects me to leave.  She knows my reputation, and if she doesn't, well, she can assume the worst.

The worst has always been the truth.

I've never wanted more than just a roll in the hay with a girl.  That night with Autumn was different.  I didn't want to get the fuck out of her house as soon as I could.  I wanted to stay there all night, buried as deeply inside her as I could be, touching her and looking at her and breathing her in.

I lay there awake after she'd finally fallen asleep, after we'd talked and talked, the way I'd never wanted to do with anyone, her warmth radiating against me.  I lay there and listened to her breathe and felt calm for the first time that I can remember.  That restless feeling, the itch that always sends me chasing something -- the next girl, the next adventure, the next high – was noticeably absent.

I was still.

Stillness isn't something I'm used to.  My life has been the exact opposite of still since the day I was born into the total chaos of the Saint family.  Hell, smoke jumping is as far away from still as you can get – it's pure adrenaline, your heart pounding, every muscle in your body tensed and on edge as you parachute from a plane into the path of a raging fire.  It's loud, louder than the loudest thing you can imagine, like being in the middle of a heavy metal concert, but instead of music it's the deafening sound of fire -- crackling, snapping, the croaking of trees as they fall to the ground.

Lying there, holding Autumn, being still…I should have hated everything about that moment.  I should have wanted to be out of her bed and on to the next conquest.  Instead, it felt like that moment when you catch your breath, drink in big gulps of oxygen, after you finish sprinting, and you're glad to be no longer moving.

Right now, I sit here in front of Autumn's house, unmoving.  And it's exactly the opposite feeling.  I'm not glad to be still.

I'm sitting here because I'm torn between the right thing to do and the thing I want to do.  The right thing to do is to keep my family bullshit way the hell away from Autumn, tell her I quit, walk away and let her believe I'm just an immature asshole who wanted a quick lay before moving on to another girl.

That's how this story should go.

That's the version of this story where Autumn isn't tainted by the Saint bullshit, by my family's legacy, by the darkness that follows me wherever I go. 

But I don't do the right thing.  I don't turn around and walk away.  Instead, I open the door and walk toward the house.