Retribution (Dark-Hunter #20)(12)
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

No one spoke until they were in the elevator. Ren folded his arms over his chest as he blocked the door and faced them. He glanced from Abigail to Jess. "You have no idea how much it bothers me to know that I was the man she meant to kill tonight and now I have to protect her."

Jess snorted. "Yeah, well, she tried to kill me, too, and I got over it."

"I’m not as good a man as you are, Sundown. I find it hard to give an enemy my back under any circumstance."

"Oh, I didn’t say I was giving her my back. I’m not lacking all my noodle sense. But I’m not holding a grudge neither. Sometimes you just got to let the rattlesnake lay in the sun."

Ren muttered an obscenity about that under his breath.

Abigail cleared her throat. "Men? You do know I’m standing in this little box with you and can hear every word?"

They exchanged an arch look.

"We know," Ren said. "I merely don’t care."

She rolled her eyes as the elevator stopped and Jess moved Ren aside so that he could open it.

Abigail hesitated before stepping out.

"Something wrong?" Jess held the door open for her with one arm.

She stuck her head out a little ways and squinted at the ground. "Making sure there’s no scorpions on the floor."

He laughed at her uncharacteristic timidity. "Miraculously, they’re all gone." The only proof of their ordeal was the hole in the ceiling that the coyotes had used to jump through earlier. "Looks safe."

Ren made a hostile noise before he pushed past them and took the rear bedroom suite.

Jess tsked at him. "You know, bud, that there’s just plain rude."

Ren held his hand up over his shoulder to flip him off as he continued on without comment or pausing.

Abigail swallowed at his open hostility. Not that she blamed him, since he had been her target. Still …

"Don’t take it too hard," Sundown said sheepishly. "Ren’s … well … he’s Ren. He don’t mean nothing."

If it were only that simple, but she did appreciate his trying to make her feel better. "He hates me."

"He’s wary of you. Big difference. Like he said, he was your target. Not exactly something a man gets over real fast."

"You seem to have adapted."

He flashed the most devilish and charming grin she’d ever seen before, and it did peculiar things to her stomach. "I’m not as bright as he is."

Oh yeah, he could be devastating when he wanted to. "I somehow doubt that."

"Is that a compliment?"

"Well, hell has indeed frozen over, in case you missed the snow on your front lawn."

He laughed as he led her toward the room he’d taken her to earlier. Now that they weren’t in fear of their lives, she could appreciate the beauty of his home. The hallway was painted a peaceful ochre with white wainscoting. The wall sconces were baroque and seemed at odds with the down-home simplicity of Sundown Brady.

"Did you decorate this place?"

He cast a frown at her over his shoulder that said he thought she was a few gallons shy of a load. "Yeah, no … decorating ain’t exactly something I strive to do in my spare time. It came with the house."

"Why did you want to live here? No offense, but it doesn’t really seem to be your style."

He paused at her room. "I think I might ought to be offended by that. What exactly are you saying about my style?"

She paused, too, then shrugged. "I don’t know. You just seem to be the kind of guy to have a man cave, not something this…"

"Refined?"

She shook her head affirmatively.

"Well, that just shows what you know. For your information, I do like some fancy things."

"Like what? Lacy underwear?"

"On my women, yeah." He flashed that grin at her that she was learning to hate. Not for any reason other than the fact that it softened his features and made him terribly irresistible.

"And-?" she asked when he didn’t continue.

He scratched at the back of his neck. "Well, opera for one and foreign films for another, especially French ones."

She scoffed. "No, you don’t."

"I can show you my Opera Guild membership card if you want to see it. Been a season ticket holder for decades."

Out of all the things about him that took her by surprise, those actually floored her. She just couldn’t imagine a man so large and tough wedging himself into an opera seat.

"Heck, I even play violin."

"You mean fiddle."

"Play that, too. But Mozart and Grieg are my favorite pieces that I like to unwind with after a hard night’s work."

In the back of her mind was a vague memory of him playing Wagner on her toy piano and then showing her what the keys were. "You taught me ‘Chopsticks.’"

"I did."

The thought of a man so huge and ripped handling such a delicate instrument was incongruous and yet …

Why can’t I remember more?

Sundown opened the door for her.

Abigail went to the bed, then paused. Instead of leaving, Sundown pulled a blanket and pillow out of the closet and made a pallet on the floor.

"What are you doing?" she asked, dreading the obvious answer.

"We tore my room up, remember? I don’t want to sleep with a big hole over my head. Plaster or something might fall down and scare me enough, I could scream like a woman and humiliate myself. I definitely don’t want to do that with Sasha in the house. He’d laugh at me forever, and I’d have to skin him."

She started to protest, but honestly she was glad to have him in here. Just in case. After everything that had happened, her nerves were shot.

You should be running from him or at least trying to kill him.

Perhaps. But if the coyotes were really after her, the last thing she wanted to do was lead them home so that they could kill her adoptive family, too. Hannah and Kurt were all she had left. And while the Apollites were good, she wasn’t sure they’d be enough to fight them. Not to mention Choo Co La Tah was right, she was exhausted to a level she’d never known before. She needed rest. At least for a couple of hours.

Then she might be up for an escape attempt.

Kicking off her shoes and pulling the band from her hair to release her ponytail, she climbed into bed. Before she could think better of it, she glanced to where Sundown lay on the floor. One thing she didn’t miss was the fact that he had one foot against the door so that if anyone opened it, it would wake him immediately. And the shotgun was on the floor only millimeters from his fingertips.

Weird … she couldn’t remember him picking it up again. Where had it come from?

Man, she must be tired to have missed that.

Pushing it out of her mind, she changed the topic. "You need another pillow?"

He covered his eyes with his arm. Something that caused his shirt to ride up and give her a glimpse of his rock-hard abs. Oh yeah, she could do laundry on that. "Nah, thanks. I’m good."

In more ways than one. He was definitely scrumptious, lying on the floor like that.

I have lost my mind. And then some. You can’t possibly find him attractive. He killed your family.

Or had he? Could he have been telling her the truth earlier? If he really was a cold-blooded killer, why not murder her instead of bringing her back here? He could have abandoned her to the scorpions and coyotes.

Instead, he’d protected her.

He’s a killer. You saw his face. You know his legend.

True. Her research of his human past had shown him to be the worst sort of humanity. Scum so foul that even bounty hunters and law enforcement had feared him.

But her personal experience with him refuted that.

What if she were wrong? She’d been so little at the time of her parents’ deaths. Did she remember that night correctly? She could still see him so clearly in her mirror. And yet there were differences between the man on the floor and the one in her memory.

Why would he seem larger now than he had when she was a kid?

Even though she needed to sleep, she wanted answers.

Before she could stop herself, she asked the one that bothered her most. "What did you and my dad fight over the night they died?"

Jess fell quiet as her whispered question stirred old memories that cut him up deep inside. Things he’d tried not to think about. Things that had haunted him for years. As bad as those memories had been for him, he could only imagine how much harder they’d been for her. Damn shame for a mite to see such a thing as what had happened to her parents.

A part of him wanted to lie, but in the end, he spoke honestly. "Your mother."

She sat up in the bed to stare at him. "What?"

Lowering his arm, Jess sighed at the inevitable confession she deserved to hear. "Your pa thought I was trying to steal her affections away from him."

"Were you?"

"Hardly. Me and her were friends and nothing more."

"You’re lying," she accused.

If only it’d been that simple. "No, sweet. I’m telling the truth. No need for me to lie about this."

"Why would my father think that unless you gave him reason to?"

‘Cause he was f**king loco, but Jess would never say that to her. The man was her pa, and the last thing he wanted to do was taint her memory of him. The truth, though-her pa had been insanely jealous of any male in Laura’s life who was over the age of five. He assumed every man was eat up with lust for her, and in his world someone couldn’t just want to talk to her because she reminded him of someone else. Nah, and the worst of it was that he’d accused her of cheating on him. Something Laura would die before she did.

Since Jess couldn’t say any of that, he went with the other simple truth. "’Cause I loved your mama, and there was nothing in the world I wouldn’t have done for her or you."

Abigail felt tears sting her eyes as she remembered the beauty of her mother’s face. She’d seen her as a wonderful angel with a smile that was filled with more warmth than the sun itself. Most of all, she remembered how safe and loved she’d felt every single time her mother wrapped her arms around her. God, to have one more second with her …

"If you were in love with-"

"Not in love, Abby. That’s what your pa couldn’t get through his thick skull. What I felt for her wasn’t that. I just wanted to make her happy and keep her safe."

"Why?"

Jess felt the tic start in his jaw as a wave of agony swelled inside him. Laura had been a perfect physical copy of Matilda. Even some of her mannerisms. But she wasn’t Tilly, and he’d known it. "She reminded me of someone I used to know." Someone I once loved more than anything on this earth.

"I don’t understand."

And it was hard to explain. "I met your ma not long after she moved to Reno. She was a waitress in a restaurant where I used to go and eat sometimes." He hadn’t been paying a bit of attention to the occupants as he took his usual seat in the small diner. He’d been staring out the window, skimming the crowd as people outside walked by, when a cup of coffee appeared on his table.

"Much obliged," he’d muttered, expecting it to be his usual waitress, Carla, who always brought him coffee the minute he sat down.

"You’re welcome." The soft lilt of that unfamiliar voice had dragged his attention to her face. Even now, he could feel the shock of looking up and being sucked back in time.

"Are you all right?" she’d asked.

He’d sputtered and mumbled something back at her that was probably as stupid to her as he’d felt when he said it. Over the next hour, he’d coerced enough information out of her that he was able to get Ed to run a thorough background check on her.

That report had stunned him as much as seeing her in the diner. Laura was the great-great-granddaughter of the child Bart had fathered the day he raped Matilda.

A child Matilda had given up for adoption.

By the time the Squires told him about the infant a few years after it’d been born, he’d been unable to locate it. Records weren’t kept the same way then as they were today. Until the night he’d stumbled across Laura and Ed had run his own check, he didn’t even know that child had been a boy.

At first, he’d been livid with the discovery and angry at fate for dropping that living reminder slap-dab in the middle of his territory. Since he knew he’d never dishonored Matilda by taking her before their wedding, there was no doubt about the paternal sperm donor for Laura’s line.

But by the next night, he’d chosen to focus on two things. One, it wasn’t the baby’s fault that he’d been conceived by violence, and there was no reason for Jess to hold that against the boy’s descendants. Two, they were every bit as much a part of the woman he’d loved as the children she’d kept and raised, and the descendants he had the Squires watch over. It was only fair he take care of Laura, too.

In Laura, he’d only seen Matilda’s genteel face.

In Abigail, he saw both. The woman he’d loved more than his life and the man he’d hated with every part of his being.

It was one hell of a combination.

"And?" Abigail prompted. "She was a waitress…"

"We became friends," he said simply. And it was the absolute truth. "I’d go in a few times a week, and we’d chat for a bit." He smiled at his bittersweet memories. Like Matilda, she’d been sweet and unassuming. "She was highly intelligent and quick-witted. Funny as all get out. I used to love listening to her banter with her friends and the other customers."