Darker Than Desire (11 page)

Without another word, she headed out.

*   *   *

“If this is your idea of cleaning, we need to talk.”

David tensed instinctively, whirling around and already on the verge of attack even before recognition hit him. The adrenaline drained out of him as he saw Lana leaning against the open door of the little woodshop tucked in the backyard of Judge Max's yard.

Breath sawed in and out of David's lungs. It took a concentrated effort to calm down.

Lana lifted a brow and he had the disconcerting feeling she knew exactly what he was thinking, what he was feeling and how close he'd been to coming after her.

She probably did.

She'd kept a good twenty feet between them, and although she kept her stance easily enough, he couldn't help but notice the odd … tension about her. Like he wasn't the only one braced for attack. The idea pissed him off, made him mad enough to tear something apart.

There were shadows on her soul now, too, and that was his fault.

“That…” He blew out a breath, waited another beat because his voice was hoarse. “That was damn fucking stupid coming up behind me like that.”

“Thus the reason I'm a good twenty feet away, darlin'.” She winked at him. “Besides, I haven't spent the past twenty years getting pampered and babied. I can handle myself.”

He had no doubt of that, but he didn't want to think about himself losing it like that, going after one of the few he could actually call friend.

Lana lifted a brow at him as she shoved off the wall. She had a faint smile on her face as she wandered around. “Man, I don't miss this place.”

“What?”

She shrugged.

“This is where Max had me hide.”

He blinked and then abruptly spun around. “Lana, I'm already walking a hair trigger. Don't add to it.”

“Or what? Are you going to turn into the Hulk or something?”

He turned his head, stared at her. “You act like this is a joke. You should be more careful.” He left the words
around me
unsaid.

“Nah.” She lifted a shoulder. “If you honestly think I need to be
careful
around you, then you need a swift kick in the ass. Probably a dozen of them.”

He swiped a hand across his face and swore under his breath. He kept waiting for that red crawl to roll across his vision, the shakes to grab him—a sure sign that his temper was going to slip away and he'd find himself on the verge of violence. When that had happened, he'd always just lost himself up on the hills, wandered for hours until he thought he was steady again.

Somehow, he didn't see Lana letting him just disappear.

But red didn't slip in to obscure his vision and his hands stayed steady.

For a minute, he stared, took a moment to just wonder at that.

Then he looked back at her.

She had a glint in her eyes, something that spoke of challenge and temper like she was just dying to push at him, poke at him. “What are you doing?” he asked softly.

“Waiting to see you.” A strange little smile lit her face, one that didn't make sense, not at all.

“What?”

She shrugged and turned away, started to roam around the four walls of the barn. “You heard me. You spent twenty years trapping yourself behind a mask. I trapped myself in a box miles away from here. I'm done with it. I'd think you'd be about the same.” One shoulder rose, fell, as she stopped in front of a dusty set of shelves.

There were books, a lot of them. Notebooks, some DIY type of books. David had already looked through them with little interest, but Lana seemed to be intent. She reached up and touched one. “This one,” she murmured. “Huh. Kingsolver. I don't see Max reading her.
Prodigal Summer.”

She slid David a narrow look over her shoulder. “Just what are you doing out here anyway?”

“What does it matter?”

“Call me curious. That's one thing that never did change.” She eyed the tools he'd moved around, shelves he hadn't put back into place. “It almost seems like you're looking for something. Me, I can't help but think maybe you should look at this.”

She reached up and pulled down that large-print edition of
Prodigal Summer
. Unlike every other book on the shelf, this one only had a fine layer of dust. She flipped it open and then pursed her lips. “Well, I'm pretty sure this wasn't in the copy
I
read,” she murmured. She eyed the hollowed-out pages for a moment and then reached in, pulled out two slim leather journals. “You wouldn't be looking for these, would you?”

*   *   *

He started with the older one first. Written by Harlan Troyer in an elegant, neat hand, the journals detailed meetings—and to David's unending disgust and fury, more names. His, Hank's, Jeb's.

This was his nightmare. That it had involved others. According to the journal, there had been three going through it along with him and he had never known their names. Initiates, they were called.

Three of them going through the same hell he'd gone through while another was formally accepted into the club. Jeb. Garth's son. “Son of a bitch,” David said softly. Now that red crawl that he had expected all day rolled across his vision and his gut twisted in fury.

Sitting on the porch as the sun made a slow trek through the sky, David read through the first journal, flipping through the pages until he reached the halfway point. There it detailed what Harlan knew about those final days and the months that came after.

Things had changed after the disappearance of Peter Sutter—David's father. Some of the older members had talked about trying to keep it going, but others thought it was too risky. Those higher up in the food chain, the Sims brothers, Andrews, Troyer, had ended up making the call and Cronus, as it had been, ended.

Without knowing what had happened, where David had gone, they didn't want to take the risk.

The last journal entry was six weeks after David and Lana had disappeared from Madison. No other notes. Nothing.

He reached for the next journal and flipped it open. A note fell out. He recognized the scrawl on it immediately:

Hopefully the right person is reading this—the prodigal son.

Of course, if you are, that means I never had the chance to turn these over to you. A part of me wonders what might have happened. We talked about the lines you cross—I crossed those lines so long ago, I can't even remember who I was before I crossed them, and once it was done I had to draw new lines. I lived by them, for a good long time.

I crossed them again, after what happened to you, and I don't regret it, but it changed me, each time. Changed me from the man I wanted to be.

I don't want to see that happen with you, boy.

You carry too much darkness in you. If I could keep any of this from you, I would. But secrets won't help you heal. Secrets put you on this path to begin with.

I'm not showing them to you so you can burn the town with them. Town is already burning. I haven't helped any, but then again, I made a promise and didn't keep it. I wanted to fix things, and those sons of bitches wouldn't have paid.

But you have more right to know than anybody who they were. That it did stop for a while. It's not good enough and I'm sorry I didn't keep my word to you, boy.

It should stop now. Pete was always the leader of the pack and the ones who tried to pull it back together had no idea what they were doing. He had his own personal hell where he reigned as king. The rest of them didn't even have a third of his brains. It's a good thing, that. It made it easier to bring it down this time.

Easier.

If anything about this can be called easy.

Max's name was scrawled at the bottom.

Down below that, in tight print, like he had decided to squeeze it in, were a few final lines:

I loved you the minute I saw you. Tried to talk her into letting me spend time with you, but she wouldn't have it. I never hated anything in my life as much as that.

Not until I saw you that night. I should have done better by you. It's a regret I'll carry the rest of my life. Forgive me.

Carefully, David folded the paper. Then he tucked it inside the journal, keeping it closed.

He couldn't look at the second journal, not just yet.

It was strange.

For so many years he'd felt little. Except the rage. Rage could always cut through. The past few weeks more and more managed to cut through, but as he sat there, it was like something inside him started to crack.

I don't want this
, he thought, heart and soul aching even as he tried to push it all away.

The fucking letter.
Should have shoved it back inside. Shouldn't have read it. Shouldn't have looked for the journals.

Max had warned him, hadn't he?

Sucking in a breath, David tensed his muscles, torn between locking the journals up, out of sight, and taking them to the river and hurling them into the slow-moving waters.

Before he could decide, the world shifted and moved sideways on him. The hairs on the nape of his neck stood up.

His blood started to pump.

Slowly, he shifted his gaze and found himself staring across the neat, tidy little lawn.

There. That was the other thing he felt, a bizarre mix of need, longing and a twist in his heart that he couldn't fully understand. It only happened around one person.

It wasn't a surprise that she'd found him here.

Nor was it a surprise when his heart did that odd little twist.

These
feelings he was familiar with, and because he'd rather deal with this torrent than the confusion that had been raging inside, he focused on what thrummed inside him when he was with Sybil.

She made him want.

She made him
need
.

And, he realized, she made him feel regret. He
could
feel it.

That pang, that tug in his heart, because he knew he needed to push her away, because he couldn't reach for her the way he wanted.

Regret that he wasn't as strong as he should be, because even as he told himself to push her away she started up the walk, the short skirt she wore barely clinging to her thighs, and all he could think about was pulling her into his lap so that the skirt rode higher and he could cup her hips, pull her down to straddle him.

Vivid, overbright starbursts seemed to explode behind his eyes as that fantasy played out in his mind.

This was a secluded street and people had finally given up on the rubbernecking. Hardly anybody drove down the street to check out the burned-out wreck of the Frampton house. He could pull that stretchy bit of fabric up and be inside her in two minutes. It would be so easy to just lose himself to her.

She came to a halt in front of him. His blood pounded in slow, steady waves while need clenched inside him like a fist.

Tell her to leave
, common sense dictated. He'd already made the decision he needed to make.

But his head, his heart, his cock, didn't want to listen.

“Hey,” she said, her red-slicked lips curving up.

He stared at her mouth, thought about seeing that mouth open, seeing it glide down his chest.

Blinking, he managed, barely, to look away. “Hey back.”

This was yet another thing he lacked, the ability to talk, even to her, about anything that didn't involve getting her naked and fucking her. Naked wasn't even necessary as long as he could be inside her, lose himself to her, hide away from the demons that chased him.

But if he kept doing that, all those demons were going to start chasing her, too.

David wasn't worth a whole hell of a lot and he didn't care about a whole hell of a lot. But he'd burn this whole damn town to the ground before he let anything from his past start to haunt her. Every moment of peace he'd ever known had come from her. She mattered, more than anything or anybody else in his miserable world.

So instead of reaching for her, he stared out at the water, acutely aware as she sat down at his side. The journals sat at the other and he resisted the urge to grab them, disappear inside the house, hide them away from her. Hide them away, hide their secrets, as if that would make the truth any less than true.

“I don't blame that kid,” Sybil said out of the blue.

Caught up in his own head, he barely understood what she meant. Looking over at her, he tracked her gaze, and then, as a shiver of cold raced up his spine, he looked back over the water.

“Plenty of people don't. Too bad he couldn't find a way to trap his dad and uncle in there, too.”

Sybil murmured, “His uncle's brains splattered all over the chief's wall.”

“He went too easy.”

“True. But Jeb's is still gone.” Her gaze came over to David. “We fell asleep on you. What did you think about the movie?”

David frowned, tried to remember something about it. The boy. Wands. A rock. Then he shrugged. “What sort of name is Snape?”

Sybil laughed. “An interesting one. For an interesting character. Is he a good guy or a bad guy?”

The question caught David off-guard. Then he looked down. “What does it matter?”

“Well, if you want to watch more of the series with us, it would be kind of fun for me to know now, what you think of him. He plays a big part in it.”

I'm not watching more.
That was what he should tell her. Sighing, he looked away. Everything he should do, he couldn't do. It had been like that for most of his life. He should have found a better way to make people listen. He should have fought harder. He should have run sooner.

Then there were the things he
shouldn't
have done. He shouldn't have involved Lana. He shouldn't have stayed in town. He shouldn't have reached for Sybil that first night.