Sweeter Than Sin (19 page)

Jensen made a rude noise in Tate’s direction and everybody laughed, including Caleb.

“You think maybe you’ll come to church Sunday?”

Caleb jerked his thin shoulders in a shrug. “I dunno. I don’t much like church, Preach.”

“Yeah. I know.” He reached up, watched as Caleb instinctively tensed. But the boy held still as Noah rubbed him on the shoulder. “But maybe someplace else would be different. Doug comes to the same place I go. You might find some peace there.”

“Peace.” Caleb looked older than his years in that moment. “I don’t want peace. I want those fuckers dead.” Then he flushed and looked away. “Sorry, sir.”

Noah squeezed Caleb’s shoulder gently and then lowered his hand. “It’s cool, Caleb.” He blew out a breath and prayed he’d find the right words. More than most, Caleb needed the
right
words right now. “I won’t claim to understand how you feel. I can tell you that I’ve spent a lot of my life angry.”

Caleb’s gaze cut his way.

Noah smiled and leaned back against the worktable behind him. Crossing his arms over his chest, he met the kid’s gaze. “You look surprised. You know that memorial over in downtown near the Methodist church? For the Sutter family?”

The boy’s thin shoulders jerked in a shrug. “Yeah. They do that dumb candlelight thing there every year.”

“Yeah. They do.” Noah lowered his gaze, staring at the dusty toes of his boots, waiting for the resurgence of his anger. All the vigils for the Sutter family. Nothing for Lana.

Every time he’d thought of it, he felt the surge of anger, resentment.

Now he felt only sadness.

He’d finally let her go. Let go of her, and all the rage that had lived inside him for so long.

“They disappeared, the entire family, twenty years ago. But they weren’t the only ones.… My girlfriend disappeared that night, too.”

Caleb blinked, a look of surprise passing across his features. “What?”

“Nobody talks about her,” Noah murmured, sighing. He skimmed a hand across his head. “It was why I started drinking. It was the only way I could sleep at night, get through the day.” Slanting a look at the boy, he added, “
That
is something I understand. Booze was how I buried the anger, how I coped with the hurt. I started not long after she disappeared. I never could bury the pain, but a drink at night helped. Then one wasn’t enough … then two. I couldn’t drink during the day, at least not at first, but I found a way later on. That anger, it was always inside me, though. If a person even looked at me wrong, I went half-crazy. Almost got myself expelled more than once. Broke my parents’ hearts time after time.”

Now he shoved off the worktable and moved to stand in front of Caleb, watching him closely. “I understand anger, Caleb. And misery. Feeling alone, and lost. I know how it can all eat you up inside. I understand the need to hurt something, somebody. I lived with that and let it destroy me for a very long time; then I had to remake myself.”

The angry tears and the defiance on Caleb’s face just about tore Noah in two. “And while I don’t understand how you feel inside right now, I can tell you that I have
never
wanted to commit an act of violence as badly as I have since the night you told me what was done to you, and to others.”

A sob broke out of him and Noah reached out, caught Caleb against him. Noah thought Caleb would tear away, but he didn’t. Caleb clutched at Noah like a drowning, dying child, a terrified one. “But they’ve done enough to you, kid. You can’t let them take anything else from you, and trying to hurt them now would take even more from you. It’s time to let somebody else handle it.”

“And what if—” The boy’s voice broke and then steadied. “What if they get away with it? What if nobody believes me and they just get away with it?”

Noah stared at the wall, clenching his jaw as he fought to steady his own voice. “I promise you. That’s not going to happen.”

*   *   *

Monday morning found Lana bent over the table making notes, an iPad propped in front of her. Adam stood in the doorway, watching her, fighting the urge to move up behind her, press his lips to her neck.

She hadn’t shared his bed again.

He hadn’t really expected her to, but there was still a hollow ache in his gut, while his dick throbbed, pulsed. He felt it had been years since he’d touched a woman instead of just hours.

He could lose himself in her twice a day, every day, for the next ten years and he knew he wouldn’t lose the need he had for her. He didn’t have ten years, though. He probably didn’t have one more day—just those hours from that one night.

She sighed, reaching up to rub her eyes, and he saw how pale she was, the strain in the set of her shoulders, the way she gripped her pen.
Talk to me.
He wanted to go to her, demand she tell him something. Anything. Everything.

Once, she’d been willing to tell him her secrets.

But that had been back when they were friends.

He wasn’t sure what they were now, but Lana seemed to have forgotten how to share bits and pieces of herself. Although maybe
forgotten
wasn’t the right word. She just didn’t let herself do it anymore. She didn’t trust herself, or she didn’t trust him. Both, probably.

Instead of pressing his lips to the delicate curve of her neck, instead of sitting down close to her, he just moved into the kitchen, moving loudly enough that her head came up. Her eyes moved to his and the faint smile on her face hit him square in the heart. He’d do almost anything to keep that smile on her face.

He might even cross out the
almost
. What would it take to take the misery from her? He just might be willing to do anything.

“Good morning,” she said, her voice husky, soft.

“Morning.” He focused on the coffee she’d brewed, giving that simple task far more attention than it deserved, but he wanted to be in control before he sat down in front of her. It was kind of nice, he mused, having somebody sitting at the small table with him in the morning.

Especially today. He wasn’t ready to be alone in his head. A few minutes ago, he’d taken a call about the funeral arrangements for Rita. One of her cousins had called, wanting to make sure he knew about the visitation and the service, but halfway through that conversation her mother had overheard and she’d yanked the phone away, screeching at him like a harpy.

By the time it was done, she’d threatened to have him arrested if he even showed his face. Adam didn’t know what he’d done to make her hate him, but he definitely didn’t want to think it through and brood alone.

“You don’t look like you’ve slept,” Lana said. There was something nervous in the back of her pale-grey eyes.

He wondered at it. He’d seen her yesterday morning before he’d had to leave for work. When he came home yesterday she’d already been tucked into her bed, and although he’d wanted to climb into the bed with her, that seemed a little presumptuous. Okay, a
lot
presumptuous.

Hadn’t stopped him from wanting to do it. Just to hold her. Wrap his arms around her and feel her next to him as they slept, to know,
finally,
that she was here, that she really was safe and alive. That whatever had put that mark on her side hadn’t taken her away from him.

A hundred things danced on the tip of his tongue and he couldn’t say any of them. A hundred questions, a hundred demands. Since none of them were the right thing to say, he just shrugged. “I never sleep well.”

“I didn’t crash until almost midnight. You weren’t home.”

He grimaced and shrugged. “Comes with owning a bar.” He could turn the late nights over to somebody else. Step into the daytime work, stop being so hands-on, but the thought of being in the house, alone, through the long, endless hours of the night was just plain torture.

Lana didn’t answer, but the weighted silence coming from her seemed too tense for her to be done. Studying her, he realized she was looking at something. Something small, cupped in her palm.

A ragged sigh slipped out of her, and then finally she put it down.

He wasn’t even surprised. The sight of the round token, a dull bronze, sitting there on the table didn’t surprise him at all. He couldn’t see which one it was, and what did it matter, really? If it had been bright enough in her room, she might have figured it out when she saw more of his tatts, but there was no hiding it now.

Besides, if she was around town long enough she’d hear.

The chip she’d laid on the table was one he’d picked up from countless meetings. He’d stopped attending the AA meetings on a regular basis years ago, but he’d still hit one from time to time if the urge hit him too hard. Sometimes he’d drop in if he thought somebody he knew might need a familiar face.

The shame, the frustration, the guilt, shouldn’t those be gone by now? He’d dealt with what he’d done. Hadn’t he? He’d climbed out of that hole. Yeah, he still had to fight the need, but he was winning.

Usually. But there he was, fighting the twisting, ugly crawl of guilt in his gut, the hot rush of blood as it crept up his neck as he stared at that token.

Even as he continued to fight with the urges.

She knew. Knowing that she knew
hurt
. It hurt his heart, his soul, his pride.

“How long?” she asked softly.

He dragged his gaze away from the token and met her eyes. “How long what?”

Pushing away from the table, he moved over to stare out the window at the backyard. He had to spend some time out there soon, dealing with the flower beds, weeding, all that shit he hated. He did it because that yard had been his mom’s pride and joy and he’d take care of it for her. And it was easier to think about that than to think about this conversation that Lana apparently wanted to have.

“How long since you stopped drinking?”

He looked back at her. “Fifteen years, give or take.” He didn’t tell her that he had hit the bottle, hard, about the same time her boyfriend had started hitting it. Adam had been quieter with it. He hadn’t gone out, gotten into fights. He just went to work at the grill, came home. Got drunk. Day in, day out. That was how he dealt with every day without her.

His parents saw it before anybody else. Adam had very much been a functional alcoholic. Nobody had seen it until the last few months before his parents died, when he’d started needing more and more. That was when he started getting in trouble, picking fights, causing trouble wherever he could.

If it hadn’t been for what happened to his parents, he would have drank his way into an early grave, he suspected.

“Adam?”

He turned and looked at Lana, standing there, holding that damn token. That tarnished little coin. He’d always thought that he and Noah were just like one of those tokens, two sides of a twisted coin.

Noah had gotten himself good and fucked up, but then he’d pulled himself out of hell. Adam had gotten himself good and fucked up … and then he’d stayed that way, sliding from one hell into another.

And nobody but Lana would understand why.

Now she wouldn’t even
tell
him what had happened, why she’d run, why she’d made him lie.

She rubbed the back of her hand over the back of her mouth. “Fifteen years…” She licked her lips. “Was … was it your parents?”

“They’d wanted me to sober up for a long time. It was the one thing I could do for them, so even though I did it over their graves, that was the final gift I gave them.” He shrugged and looked back outside. “It wasn’t much of a gift, but it was all I could do.”

Silence was a dark, ugly weight and then the chair squeaked across the floor and he turned to watch as Lana crossed the floor to him. She stopped a few feet away, her eyes troubled. “I don’t understand.… You didn’t start drinking then? When they died?”

Then?
He stared at her.

Then he looked away. “I grabbed my first drink the day I had to lie about your phone call, Lana.”

He went to go around her, intent on changing into some work clothes and sweating himself to death out in the backyard. Manual labor would feel good. Damn good.

“Adam.”

Her voice, soft and shaken, stopped him before he hit the door.

Closing his eyes, he rested a hand on the wall. “What?”

“What … what phone call?”

*   *   *

For the longest time, he didn’t look at her.

He stood there, his back to her and his head bowed, one hand braced on the wall. Tension wrapped around him, practically vibrating from him—she could see it in the rigid muscles of his back, the stiff line of his spine and the way his hand clenched into a fist as he slowly turned to face her.

His jaw bunched as he stared at her and she felt she was seeing the face of a stranger.

Not a boy she’d chased after as she grew up, not a boy she’d secretly had a crush on throughout most of school. He’d all but broken her heart when he’d brushed her off as he got older. But she’d been stubborn and refused to give up. He’d been too old for her and she knew that. Just because she couldn’t
have
him didn’t mean they couldn’t be friends, though, and she wasn’t about to give up on her hero so easily. And Adam might have been a grouchy teenager, but he hadn’t been cruel. He’d been pulling away from her, but he wouldn’t outright turn his back on her, and when she’d plunked herself down next to him at the table in his parents’ house he’d just rolled her eyes and listened as she chattered.

Now, though, she felt like she was looking at somebody she didn’t know.

And not just because of the twenty years when she had disappeared into nowhere.

“What
phone call
?” he demanded, his voice slicing through the silence of the kitchen, as brutal as a backhanded blow.

She flinched and then, as anger started to trickle through her, she stiffened her spine and stared at him. “Yes. What phone call?”

Two long strides closed the distances between them and he shot out a hand, closed it around the front of her T-shirt and jerked her against him.

He stared at her, his brown eyes hot, molten. The breath jolted out of her, and to her utter and complete surprise she felt something stir down deep inside her belly. Hot, potent lust. Part of her wanted to shove her hands into his hair and pull his face to hers. Part of her wanted to lick and bite at his mouth and turn that anger into a passion of another kind.