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  The screech of rusty hinges didn’t surprise me as Deck Gentry opened the door and joined me outside. I heard him sit down on the creaky trailer step. The air had a bitter chill I had not felt in a long time, not since my life in Jericho Valley had ended. The frigid wind carried the sound of ‘O Holy Night’ crying across the desert, music from a distant radio. As the minutes passed I felt Deck’s eyes on me.

  “I’m twenty eight,” he said.

  A smile crossed my face. I didn’t turn around though. “You’re right. That is old.”

  He chuckled. “Watch it, Jenny.”

  “Jennetta,” I corrected, finally facing him. “My first name is really Jennetta, although I never use it anymore. Jenny was always a nickname.”

  “Declan Antonio Gentry,” he answered and held out his hand.

  I met his firm handshake, my small hand disappearing into the palm of his large one. “It’s nice to meet you, Declan.”

  He dropped my hand and removed a cigarette, raising an eyebrow as he held the pack out. I shook my head and turned around again to stare into the desert. It was utterly dark in a way that the cities and suburbs never get to appreciate. I pointed to the hazy light from the trailer I’d noticed earlier.

  “Your neighbor?” I asked.

  Deck inhaled and exhaled twice before answering. “Yes,” he muttered. “You could call them neighbors.”

  He sounded sad. First impressions would imply that Deck was one of the rougher men nature ever made. But because of Promise’s husband, Gray, I’d learned that the men who have the most fearsome appearances might be the ones with the gentlest hearts.

  There was a flip side to that coin though. Life had also taught me that the men who were revered and seemingly wholesome could really be devils in disguise.

  “Do you have any family, Deck?” I asked, looking his way again because I really wanted to hear the answer. This was Christmas night and suddenly I was a little sad, a little lonely. Declan Antonio Gentry was the only other soul around and I wanted to know him, and not just because of the strong physical attraction I couldn’t quite suppress. I disliked the wave of melancholy that had washed over me and Deck had already been my salvation several times tonight. I couldn’t imagine what reason he would have for looking after me the way he did. If he’d meant to mistreat me, he’d already had the opportunity and refused to take it. But maybe I shouldn’t even be asking myself why. Maybe it wasn’t necessary to have a reason for one person to behave decently to another.

  Deck’s attention was focused in the direction of the grim little home I’d pointed to in the darkness.

  “I’ve got some family,” he said gruffly and snuffed out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe.

  “Me too,” I said quietly. I was thinking of Promise and Gray and their children. I also missed my brother Daniel, as well as his wife, Lupe, and Bella, my little niece. Suddenly I wanted to talk about it all, about the people who meant so much to me. But no, there was too much I couldn’t tell Deck. I could never have told him about my imprisoned father and his estranged wives, or the many siblings I’d lost touch with since Jericho Valley was raided, scattering the community forever. I also couldn’t talk about the woman I’d glimpsed folding shirts in a Scottsdale department store last month. She was busy with her work and didn’t notice that I was standing nearby. There had been so many times before that I’d thought I’d seen her, perhaps because I was always secretly looking and always would be. I wondered if she also looked for me in the faces of the countless young women who likely passed her every day.

  However Deck didn’t ask me why I wasn’t with the family I claimed to have. He stood and opened the door. “You’ll freeze out here, Jennetta. You need to come inside now.”

  “Do I?” I snapped before I realized it, bristling at the order. Perhaps that’s the way it would be forever; I would automatically take offense whenever any man said the slightest thing that sounded like a command. It didn’t matter if he’d meant it to be harmless. For so many years I’d been told that my own free will didn’t exist and when I rebelled the consequences were disastrous. I was still trying to find my way out of that ruinous haze. There had been a few boys in California, boys who wanted to touch me. At the time I’d wanted to feel them too. But then as soon as they got there I pushed them away. I couldn’t stand it, the idea of surrendering.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered to Deck and started trudging toward the door with my head down. He’d lived longer and he’d obviously lived hard. He probably understood that just because I didn’t get fucked tonight didn’t mean I wasn’t fucked up.

  He touched my arm as I passed. “Nothing to be sorry for, Jenny.”

  It was such a small act, such a simple gesture of kindness from a man who owed me nothing. Deck might have thought I was being snotty when I just walked past him without saying anything but I was only silent because didn’t want to risk crying. I’d already shown enough weakness tonight.

  As soon as I was back inside the trailer I swiped my bra off the floor and rolled it up beneath Deck’s sweatshirt.

  “Well,” I said, trying to sound detached and unconcerned. “I’m really tired so I think I’m going to take you up on that offer.”

  Deck closed the door and stood back, studying me.

  I winced a little as I realized my comment sounded vaguely sexual. I shuffled and crossed my arms. “I mean, the offer to use your bed for the night.”

  He was still staring. My god, he was crazy gorgeous. Suddenly he gave me a mystic little smile that let me know he was fully aware of the things a smile like that could do to a woman.

  “So go use it,” he said. “The bed, that is.”

  A shudder rolled through me and I knew it would be a long time before I could stop thinking about the way his hands had been all over my body. When I’d impulsively taken my shirt off I’d done it to show him I wasn’t someone he could laugh at. I’d also done it because something had stirred deep inside of me and I wanted him. Declan’s touch was electrifying and I had no doubt he’d used it on many women. He could have screwed me easily. Even though my own fears had begun screaming inside my head I hadn’t said a word about them. I wouldn’t have told him to stop. But he did stop. At least for a few seconds he had understood me even better than I understood myself.

  “Good night, Declan,” I said, retreating under his dark-eyed watch.

  A piece of black hair fell across his forehead and he pushed it back automatically.

  “Good night, Jennetta.”

  “I told you no one calls me that anymore.”

  He took a step in my direction. Then he took another one and I had to bend my neck back to look up at him. I didn’t flinch when he ran a finger along my collarbone.

  “You did tell me that,” he agreed. The he abruptly took my face in his hands and kissed me hard. It wasn’t a quick kiss and our tongues collided in a heated dance as I arched my body closer to him, wrapping my arms around his shoulders, growing dizzy over the feel of his muscles. If Deck would just kiss me like that all night and keep me close I would love it. I would surrender, and happily.

  He broke the kiss as suddenly as he’d started it. “Go on now,” he pushed me. “Get on the other side of that door before I decide I’ve had enough of being the good guy.”

  I put my hand on his chest. It was rock solid. “What if I don’t want you to be the good guy?”

  The look he gave me was piercing, and rather unfriendly. “Don’t bluff me a second time, kid. My manners are all used up for tonight.”

  “Deck, I-“

  “Goddammit, GO!” he yelled and just like that I went from wanting him to not even wanting to be in the same room with him. I hustled behind the door, grabbing my purse along the way.

  The door was very old and closed with a latch on the inside. I stood there on the other side, listening to the sound of my heart pounding. I couldn’t hear anything else. Deck must not have moved from the spot he was standing in. I hadn’t looked around too caref
ully when I was in here earlier, but now I could see the room was little more than a closet, roughly the size of the room I’d shared with my sister when we were growing up. I pushed the little metal latch through the hole even though it was purely symbolic, and silly. If Deck wanted to get in here it wouldn’t take much for him to make mincemeat of that pathetic door.

  I was tired. I was so very tired. The chainsaw snoring of my roommate, Ally, would have kept a bear awake, but I’d been tired long before I’d arrived at school in August. I hadn’t slept well in a long time. Sometimes as I drifted off I was haunted by the screams of a sixteen-year-old boy as he was beaten. And on occasion my head still pounded with my own inconsolable sobs as I begged my parents, begged them, to put a stop to what had been set in motion. But everyone in power had gone deaf and when I awoke on the morning of my sham of a wedding I swore I would never cry again.

  My panties were still lying in a sad little ball at the foot of the bed where they had been abandoned. I pulled them up over my thighs and felt a fresh wave of shame. When Deck had asked me if I’d ever had sex before, I’d given him a childish, “Sort of.” That was the closest I could come to the truth though. What I’d done with Reese had been an unplanned, frenetic rebellion against the people who controlled us. I couldn’t even remember what it had been like, only that during those brief minutes I’d had a lot of hate in my heart. The self-styled prophet who had taken me as his seventh wife, violating the laws of man and nature, was near death when I was given to him. The only relief I ever got out of the situation was that he was too weak to violate me.

  The only light in the room was a bleak bedside lamp. When I turned it off the world went nearly black, except for a faint strip of light shining beneath the door. I remembered Deck had given me his phone and I pulled it out of my purse. I had no reason to use it. I just wanted to hold it. Silence reigned, though I knew Deck was still just on the other side of the door. There was nothing else to do but let the night have its way and try to sleep. Deck’s bed was comfortable. I rolled a plush blanket around my body like a cocoon and curled up in the middle of it, feeling foolish and adolescent. I should be better than this. My sister Promise had endured so much more. But she was stronger, overcoming the twisted cruelty we’d been born to and finding love on her own terms. For a while I thought I could be like her. But so much time had passed since our days with the Faithful and my heart was still tormented.

  I hadn’t healed after all. I’d only hardened.

  CHAPTER SIX

  DECK

  Shit, I would have hated myself. I would have made it good for her, and Amelia would sure as hell have been knocked out of my head, but rutting away inside Jenny Smith would have ground me to a new low. And I almost did it anyway.

  When I heard her latch the bedroom door and was satisfied that she planned to stay in there, I sank into the lone kitchen chair and thanked the sex gods for granting me some restraint for once.

  My very first fuck had been standing up in the bedroom of a woman named Grace Parker. It was the summer after my freshman year at Emblem High and I was earning a little money with Ray Chavez’s landscaping crew. Grace Parker, or Mrs. Parker, as I had always known her, was twice my age and worked in the post office. I’d been blowing the dead mesquite leaves from her front yard when she invited me inside the house and I couldn’t even remember what excuse she gave. Ray was fifteen feet up the trunk of a palm tree and I noticed his glare but he said nothing. Mrs. Parker knew what she wanted and wasn’t real formal about it. Man, that woman had tits and she had ass. She also had a condom open and her pussy waiting. I knew if my mother found out about it she would have raised hell and marched down to the police station even though they’d have laughed in her face. But shit, for a few minutes of frantic humping against the door of the Parkers’ bedroom I had felt like the luckiest asshole on the planet.

  Maybe that’s why I gained an early appetite for fucking women instead of girls. Girls had to be coaxed, and they had to be promised things. They wanted a prize for letting you pop their cherries. They wanted you to say nice words and hold them all the livelong night until you lost the feeling in your arms.

  “Am I the only one, Deck? The only one you want? Tell me again. Okay, now again. Now kiss me and tell me one more time.”

  Women, on the other hand, just wanted to come hard and make you come hard too.

  “Shit Deck, keep going harder. I’m almost there. AHH! Fuck you’re good, I’ll suck you off after.”

  My mother heard the rumors of course because women talked and Emblem was the kind of small town fishbowl where even a whisper echoed infinitely. She pleaded with my father to do something to rein me in but by that time they were living apart and she didn’t have much authority with him. Besides, Chrome was wildly proud that his son was putting it to half the married pussy in town. The only times I felt sorry about it were when I could hear my mother’s tearful prayers whispered in Spanish. She’d come up here from central Mexico as a teenager; pretty, penniless and orphaned. Tough guy Chrome Gentry could be one enchanting bastard and he must have turned on the charm to get her to even look twice in his direction, let alone marry him. Seemed like it didn’t take long for shit to go sour though and eventually even her only child turned into just another heartbreak. My parents’ marriage was cold and sexless long before she finally abandoned it. In a strange quirk of fate, she died in a car accident on the Interstate less than a month after my father’s crash. I missed her. I wished I could have been the son she deserved.

  All was silent in the trailer. If I didn’t know better I would have been sure I was alone. I hoped Jenny had fallen asleep. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was about her that bothered me so much. She was hot and she was sweet, but there was an underlying desperation there that made me uneasily sure she hadn’t had a nice time in life. Sprawled in my kitchen chair on Christmas night, I exhaled once more with relief that I had managed to stop myself from using her. She was different from what I usually took to bed. She was dangerous that way because Jenny might have the power to get inside my heart and that was a hell of a risky place. I fell asleep propped up in the chair as unwanted memories tried to crowd my head. I beat them back. I’d already been reminded of Amelia enough tonight to shake me the fuck up.

  When I awoke, the first gray light of winter dawn was filtering through the thin window shades and Jenny was staring at me. She was, thankfully, still wearing my sweatshirt so I didn’t have to deal with the effect of her tits on my morning boner.

  “You been doing that long?” I asked, easing my body out of the chair and grimacing over my stiff neck and sore back.

  “You mean breathing?” she answered, smiling. “A little while, Deck.”

  I groaned and stretched. “So you’re a smartass even before the sun comes up. How long have you been staring at me, girl?”

  “Oh, that. About fifteen minutes. You were drooling.”

  “Was not,” I growled, a bit irritable that this kid had thrown me off balance before I got a gulp of coffee down my throat.

  Jenny seated herself in the chair I had spent the night in while I started a pot of coffee. She crossed her arms in her lap and acted like she wasn’t staring at my body. When I glanced at her I saw the way her face was reddening and figured she might be thinking about a few things, like maybe the way my dick felt in her mouth. I kind of wanted to think about that too. She had such soft lips. I could show her how to make good use of them.

  Get her the hell out of here before she gets fucked from here to next October.

  I set a cup on the table beside her and poured myself one.

  “You don’t drink coffee?” I asked, when she peered into the cup and sniffed.

  “Not really,” she said and took a tentative sip. Her eyes were a dark shade of green and they surveyed me carefully. “What do all your tattoos mean?”

  “Why do you ask so many fucking questions?” I cringed over my own rudeness. It hadn’t been intentional. She looked away and I dow
ned the rest of my coffee, searching for more polite words. “Actually I did ink for a while. Sometimes I still do, although I’m no great artist. Got most of these in various foreign hellholes back when I was in the Marines.”

  Jenny stood up and looked me over. Hot damn it’d feel good to be inside of her. So fucking good. I could have been in there right now, owning the shit out of that pussy.

  “This is beautiful,” she said softly, brushing her fingers over my upper arm to trace the shape of a ghostly long-haired angel holding a sleeping infant. Why the hell did she have to pick that one to focus on? It was beautiful. It was also horrible.

  “Thanks,” I said shortly, backing away from her touch even though I knew she wasn’t trying to be seductive. “I’m gonna go jump in the shower and then I’ll drive you out of here. If you’re hungry, help yourself to whatever you can find.” I didn’t wait to hear if she answered. I closed myself in the tiny bathroom and turned the cold water on full blast. If she followed me in there that would be it, the last goddamn straw. I would ride that girl like nobody’s fucking business and to hell with any remorse. She didn’t follow me though. I stood there alone under the icy spray and took care of things myself.

  By the time I threw on some clothes I was beyond eager to get Jenny Smith out of my hair. Driving up to Tempe was usually a good ride. The temperature had warmed considerably since last night and the snow was long gone. There wouldn’t be much traffic the day after Christmas. I could dump her off on the ASU campus and pat myself on the back for my good deed.

  When I opened the bathroom door and caught sight of her sitting there at my crappy table, her hands were clasped in her lap and she looked sad, so terribly sad. I was tempted to hold her, to push the strands of dark hair from her forehead and take her in my arms. The problem was it wouldn’t end there. I wasn’t capable of letting it end there. When Jenny realized I was looking at her she snapped to attention and her face went impassive. I had the impression she did that often, that she wore masks to hide what she didn’t want people to see.