The drive to Dallas was nearly ten hours from Las Cruces.

Alli was in the shower when I woke, no sound but the splash of the water coming from the bathroom. I went to a diner across the parking lot and got us some coffee. She was curled up on the bed when I came back, a little more pale than she’d been the night before. I showered quickly and gathered our stuff. She didn’t say anything, didn’t ask about what had happened the night before, didn’t even seem interested. We drove most of the day without exchanging more than a few words. She slept off and on, sneaking off to use the bathroom more often than seemed necessary at each stop we made. The distinct scent of vomit clung to her most of the morning. Hang over.

I felt like an ass after what had happened last night. She was drunk. I shouldn’t have taken advantage of her. I stole glances at her, expecting her to look at me with hurt or accusation in her eyes. But then it occurred to me that she’d think I was just like every other man who’d ever hurt her.

That was worse.

“Has anyone ever treated you with kindness?” I asked when we stopped for lunch. She was picking at a wilted salad, clearly not interested, but making an effort just the same. She looked up, her eyes moving slowly over me with something like disinterest in her eyes.

“Harry. Harry treated me pretty good.”

“Harry?”

“Harry Cravits. Jack’s friend.”

I nodded, well aware of who Harry Cravits was. I ruined my career to help find his killer, didn’t I?

“You were together?”

She shook her head. “He wanted to be. He came around all the time, trying to take care of me and my girls. But I…” She sighed. “I wasn’t nice to him.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “I wanted to be. I saw the way he looked at me, the way he mooned over me whenever he was around. I knew he thought he was in love with me. But he didn’t know me all that well.”

“Does anyone?”

A wry smile twisted her lips. “I don’t know.”

“You love him back?”

She looked up at me. “I wanted to.”

We didn’t say much after that. By the time we got to Dallas, it was late, and she was asleep against the door. I pulled into the roadside motel that was listed on Patrick’s itinerary to arrange for rooms, but there was a game in town, and they were booked almost solid. All they had was one double.

Alli was so sound asleep that she didn’t even respond when I picked her up and carried her into the room. I set her on the bed closest to the bathroom and repeated what I’d done the night before, tugged the bedspread over her after removing her boots.

Was this how the rest of this trip was going to go?

I settled on my own bed after bringing in our luggage. I couldn’t help but look over at her. She had a hand tucked under her jaw, her lips softly parted as she slept. Whenever I looked at her, I saw the pleasure that had danced in her eyes while we were…it made my body harden every time I thought about it. Tension rolled through my shoulders even as things down below stiffened. I wanted nothing more than to crawl into that bed with her and show her what it was like when you took your time with intimacy. But I’d already taken advantage of her once. I couldn’t do it again.

My dreams were filled with terrors all night. I woke repeatedly, my heart pounding. I couldn’t remember the dreams, but knew they hadn’t been good. Guilt never made for an easy night.

 

 

She was singing.

I rolled over, my body sore with the stiff position I’d finally fallen asleep in. I lay still, listening to her voice rise above the water in the shower.

I hoped that was a good sign.

I was just sitting up, rubbing my face with my hands, when she stepped out of the bathroom in nothing but a towel. The sink was separate from the shower and toilet in this room, the mirror and hairdryer a part of the bedroom. She stood in front of the mirror and began working on her face, the thin towel barely big enough to wrap fully around her perky little breasts.

“Alli…”

“The shower’s free.”

I stood, tugging my t-shirt down over my shorts as I crossed the room. She had this power over me…no matter what I did or what I tried to distract myself with, seeing her always caused a reaction. She watched me pass behind her in the mirror, a devilish smile on her full lips.

I considered cold water as I prepped the shower, but decided it wouldn’t work. I stood under the water, my eyes closed, my thoughts still on the vision of her in that damn mirror.

Why was I so obsessed with her? Was I really just that lonely?

“You’re from El Paso, aren’t you?”

I jerked in surprise, tugging open the curtain to peek out. She was curled up on the closed toilet lid, her feet tucked under her bare ass. She was still wearing the towel, but it gaped open along her hip.

“Alli, you shouldn’t be in here.”

“I saw the way you stared out the windshield as we drove through the city. Every time we passed a street sign that meant something to you, I saw the way you strained to look out over the length of the road.”

I nodded, tugging the shower curtain closed. “I am from El Paso.”

“Are your parents still there?”

“I have no idea where my mother is. My father died fifteen years ago from liver failure.”

“Tough break.” She was quiet for a minute. “My first husband died.”

I opened the curtain again, peeking at her. “Really?”

She nodded. “He was a graduate student. He liked to study late into the night, sitting up in bed beside me. One morning I woke up, and he was slumped over his books, bleeding from his nose. Could have sold the damn books back to the school, but he ruined them.”

“Heart attack?”

“Cocaine overdose. Turned out he liked to do it to keep him awake. I had no clue.”

“That sucks. Waste of life.”

“Yeah.” She brushed her wet hair from her face, a face she hadn’t yet painted. “My father was horrified for his program, my mother disgusted by what it might do to her reputation. She made me sign papers that showed my husband and I had annulled our marriage a week before his death so that no one would associate him with our family.” She grunted. “We were only married three weeks.”

“No shit?”

“I was eighteen. But even I knew that was cold. I took off, realized I didn’t fit in their world. Took a bus to California.”

“Are your parents still alive?”

“Alive and kicking. They live up in Oregon, though I’ve heard rumors that my mother wants to run for Congress.”

“No kidding…”

She shrugged. “She always was ambitious.”

I closed the curtain again and turned my attention to the bar of soap she’d left behind from her shower. She was quiet for so long that I thought she might have left the room. But then she began again.

“I met my second husband in Los Angeles. I got in with this group of people who followed around these up and coming bands, convinced one of them was going to make it big someday. None of them did.” She snickered a little. “My husband was a roadie for one of the bands.”

“A musician?”

“A musician wannabe. But we all were back then.” She was quiet a long moment, and I could picture her running her hands through her long, thick hair. “They were all hooked on drugs. I did a little weed, a few ludes, but I refused to touch coke. That was his thing.” Again that soft snicker. “Leave it to me to fall for two cokeheads.”

“He was fucking charming,” she continued a moment later. “Always knew the right thing to say. Made me feel like a queen. But then we got married, and I got pregnant with Sue, and he had real responsibilities. He couldn’t handle it. Beat the shit out of me the first time when I was seven months pregnant. Doctors thought I might go into premature labor, but Sue held on. The beatings came pretty regularly after she was born, every time he couldn’t get up the money to pay a bill or couldn’t get his coke. When he was there, anyway. He got arrested six times the year after Sue was born. When she was barely two, the cops came to me and told me they knew what he was up to, but they didn’t have the evidence they needed. Said if I’d help them get him, they’d put me under protection, make sure he couldn’t hurt me again.” A soft snort. “They didn’t have to promise me anything. I would have helped them no matter what. Didn’t matter, though. They never did follow through, but he went to jail, and that was all I wanted.”

I closed my eyes, my chest aching for the child Alli had once been.

“Then we went to Palm Springs. I worked as a maid in some of the big houses down there. My third husband…he was truly a prince charming, coming in on his white horse quite literally. He owned a ranch next to one of the houses I worked in, and he rode up to me on a white horse one afternoon and treated me like I wasn’t a maid. It was…” I could hear her sigh even over the water of the shower. “I thought he was a prince.”

“Was he?” I stuck my head out of the shower curtain again. “Was he good to you?”

“He was. But then we got married, and three fucking weeks later…why is it always three weeks?” She glanced at me like I had all the answers. “I woke in the middle of the night because Sue was crying. She never cried, you know? So I go down this long, wide hallway to her room and find him in there, his shorts down around his ankles.”

Heat rushed into my face, and my fists clenched.

“I grabbed my daughter and ran. His engagement ring kept us for a while, and then we stumbled into Ellaville. Best and worst thing to ever happen to me.”

“You ever see him again?”

“No. His lawyer contacted me after a year and offered me a shitload of money to give him a divorce. I took it because we needed it. I worked odd jobs, you know? I barely graduated from high school. I wasn’t educated well enough to do anything else.”

“But you own a business.”

She nodded, a slow smile touching her lips. “That happened years later. I had Tommy—her father was just some loser I met at a club one night—and I got in with a couple of other mothers at her preschool. One of them invited me to a party. I think it was just to round out the group, but it turned out to be a sex toy party. This woman came, and we played dirty games, then she took each of us into a bedroom to show us her sex toys. Her sale pitch sucked, and I knew I could do better. So I found out how to get into it and started selling the toys out of my house. I didn’t have to have the stupid parties. I just put out a bunch of flyers and business cards, and women came flocking to me. They liked the anonymity of it, you know?”

“You must have done well to move into a physical store.”

“I did really well. I still do well despite those Guardians and that stuffy damn church.”

I nodded, stepping back under the spray of water. I poured shampoo into my hair, thinking about what she’d said. No wonder she had had such a hard time. She’d had to run all her life. That sort of thing either killed a person or made them stronger. Clearly, it’d made her stronger.

I once again thought she’d moved on when I turned off the water and didn’t hear a sound. But as I was drying off behind the closed curtain, she cleared her throat.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Do you really think I’m hurting my girls?”

Regret washed over me as she finally confirmed that she remembered all that had happened the other night. I wrapped the towel around my waist and tore the shower curtain open.

“I’m sorry I said that.”

“Is it true?”

I tilted my head to one side. “I’ve never met your girls. I don’t know if I’m the best person to answer that question.”

“Everything I’ve done for the past twenty-four years was for my girls.”

“I know. And I’m sure they know that, too.”

Her eyes moved slowly over me, lingering briefly over the bulge under my towel. Just that movement of her eyes made me begin to stiffen. As if to underscore that fact, she stood and released her towel, giving me a quick peek of her naked body. But then she tugged it close against her again, tucking one end under the other.

“I should get dressed.”

She left the room, and I groaned, the need in my loins greater than I thought I could stand. But then her words, my own actions, reminded me of the mistakes I’d already made. I’d taken advantage of a drunk woman. It was the most awful thing I’d ever done, and I’d done a lot I regretted. I didn’t understand how she could even look at me.

I dressed slowly, taking as much time as possible to give her some space. When I finally left the bathroom, she was at the sink again, applying a thin layer of that lip gloss to her full lips. She was dressed more conservatively than I’d ever seen her, in a pair of jeans and a vintage Pink Floyd shirt. The shirt was fitted, and I could see her dark bra underneath, but there was a hell of a lot less skin than she normally displayed. It was nice. Attractive.

She caught me looking in the mirror and smiled.

I dragged my fingers over my face and sighed, ducking out of the room before I gave her the wrong idea.

The truck was parked at the curb in front of the room. I saw the note the second I stepped out, everything that had been roaring through my mind suddenly silent. It was a small square of paper just like the ones that had been decorating my windshield for the past six weeks.

Back on track. Good. That’ll make it easier for us to come for you.

That sent a chill down my spine.

They knew we didn’t stop in El Paso like we were supposed to. How did they know that?

Who were these people? Was this a real threat?

I’d assumed from the beginning that these notes were coming from someone with the sheriff’s department who blamed me for the sheriff’s downfall. But was this something more? Did it have something to do with the Guardians?

If that was true, I could be in real trouble. I was going to have to watch my ass.