Warm.Her skin was so damn warm.
Smooth too.Like a baby’s bottom. Although his mind certainly wasn’t conjuring up images of an infant.
Even though his eyes wanted to track down to what he knew would be her nipples poking against the silky fabric, he managed to keep his attention focused on her lovely—albeit bruised and swollen—face.
“What did I tell ya ’bout movin’ too quickly?”
She ignored him. “That’swhy he’s in prison?”
“Doing life without parole in Pollack Penitentiary.” He nodded. “The bastard deserved the death sentence. But because it was considered acrime of passion”—he made derisive air quotes—“he was only found guilty of second-degree murder.”
Thinking of how his old man was still drawing breath when his mother was nearly two decades in the ground made him grind his teeth so hard his molars ached. “If ya ask me, the world would be a better place if he’d had a needle shoved in his arm years ago. But I don’t make the laws. Or the sentencin’ guidelines.”
He watched her throat work over a swallow. The skin there looked as pale and warm as the skin on her shoulders. His fingers itched to touch her again. Which is why he busied them—and himself—with turning toward the lamp on his side of the bed and switching off the knob.
The light in the room was instantly halved.
Good.
He didn’t want her seeing how deeply he could hate. How easily it would’ve been for him to beat and strangle his father the way his father had beaten and strangled his mother.
How much like him I truly am.
Settling back against the pillow, he refused to meet Eliza’s gaze as she stared down at him.
Either she realized he needed the illusion of privacy if he was going to finish telling his tale, or she didn’t like what little she could still see of his expression. Because she switched off her own lamp. To his relief, the room was plunged into darkness.
His eyes were instantly drawn to the large window and the night sky beyond.
In the city, there was no such thing as pitch blackness. Light pollution dulled the brilliance of the moon and diminished the twinkling of the stars. So much so that when he was home in Chicago he forgot what it was like to look up and see the Milky Way spread out above him like a blanket of confetti.
He realized it wasn’t the city’s glow affecting his ability to count the constellations now, though. It was a quickly approaching storm. A large, dark cloud rolled across the moon, obscuring its silver face.
Menacingwas the word that drifted through his head as he stared at the stygian sky. That thought was quickly followed up by something else. Something that made the hairs on his arms lift.Portentous.
Dark nights were meant for dark deeds. For the stalking of demons. For…death.
He scolded himself for his foolishness. Having been raised in the backwoods of Louisiana, he’d grown up with tales of haints and the fifolet and skin-walkers bent on mayhem and murder. So it was easy to sometimes forget that all the evil in the world was perpetuated by man and not some shadowy, faceless monster that crawled through the night.
He felt her settle back against her own pillow. Felt her snuggle beneath the covers. And then he had to hold back a sigh of relief when he felt her little fingers once again interlace with his own.
After what he’d revealed, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she never wanted to touch him again.
The sins of the father and all that jazz.
Her voice was as thick as the darkness in the room when she whispered, “I’m so sorry, Fisher. How old were you?”
“It was three weeks before my sixteenth birthday. I spent the last two years of high school bouncin’ from couch to couch. And as soon as I got my diploma, I was out of there. Gone. Adiosed from anyone who knew about the stain on my family name, about what my daddy had done to my momma.”
For a while after that, she was quiet. And when he heard her breaths go from shallow to deep, from thready to steady, he thought maybe she’d fallen asleep. But her voice didn’t hold even a hint of sleepiness when she finally asked, “Why’d he do it? Kill her, I mean. Did you ever find out?”
Of all the questions she could ask, that was the easiest to answer. “Because Nash Wakefield never should’ve fallen in his version of love. Because all he was truly capable of was obsession. Because he was possessive and controlling and jealous. Because hecould.”
He heard her long, windy exhalation and expected a follow-up question.
It never came.
Into the silence he said, “He got off work early one day and saw her talkin’ to a man outside the Quickie Stop. Not flirtin’ or touchin’ or anything like that. Just talkin’.” His stomach roiled as he relived what he knew of the events. He’d heard all the witness testimony at trial, had seen all the gas station security footage that’d been played for the jury. “He didn’t even give them time to react or explain that they were strangers who were talkin’ ’bout how hot the weather had turned. He just reached beneath the seat of his truck for his pistol, shot that nice man in the head, and then dragged Momma home where he beat her and raped her and finally strangled her to death.”
