King Among the Dead - Lauren Gilley Page 0,24
the warmth in her voice.
Kay looked up at her, still brimming with worry, and studied her face. Finally, her brow smoothed, and she nodded sharply, once. Pulled away and went back around to the other side of the bed, pointing Rose back to her own corner.
They got the fitted sheet squared away in silence, and shook the flat one out between them; it bellied up, full of air, throwing off the scent of lavender and clean cotton, fluttering the gold tassels on the bed hangings. Then it settled and they began smoothing it with broad swipes of their palms.
“When did you see his holsters?” Kay asked. Her voice had lost some of its usual shine. Was instead flat. Guarded, Rose thought. “The night he got Tabby?”
“No. It was a few weeks ago. I accidently stayed up late reading in the library, and I was still there when he got home.”
“Oh.” She paused, hands braced on the mattress until Rose met her gaze. Hers was narrow, and dark, and totally foreign. “What did he say?”
Rose replayed it in her mind, each little detail plucking her nerves with pleasant shivers. The way he’d gripped his whiskey glass; the shadows on his cheeks when he took his first drag; the tension in his throat; and his eyes, always his eyes.
A portrait she found herself wanting to hold close. Something just for her, and no one else. She said, “I was reading Jane Eyre. We discussed Rochester.”
Kay stared at her – stared her down. Searching for a crack, waiting for her to flinch. Rose wanted to rewind time, to leave the gun where she’d found it and pretend she’d never noticed it. But, given that wasn’t possible, she wasn’t going to flinch. She’d known Kay long enough now to regret this sudden, oily tension spilled between them, but also to know that, while the woman doubtless had her own secrets and dangerous qualities, Rose wasn’t afraid of her. Not of her or Beck.
Finally, the hard look melted, and Kay let out a reluctant chuckle. “Damn, honey. You ain’t no meek mouse, are you? My mistake.” She went back to smoothing the sheet, and her next question was asked with her usual blend of casual curiosity. “He tell you where he’d been?”
“No, and I didn’t ask.”
“Smart girl.”
She hadn’t asked, but she’d run possibilities through her head. She’d lived in the Bends most of her life, had gone to school for years with other Bends kids – kids whose parents and older siblings and even some of the kids themselves had worked in the even seedier parts of town. She knew the sorts of places a man might go when he left the house after ten p.m. The drug dens, the strip clubs, the sex clubs. Places to pay for an hour of a woman’s time; places to bet on bare-knuckle fights. Places to stick a needle in your arm and make the whole world go away.
She’d seen junkies, though, and Beck wasn’t one – if he dabbled in that arena, it was only dabbling, and he played it off well. He’d had a cigarette that night, though, and a drink. He’d said after. After what? She imagined a woman raking her nails down his black-clad chest, playing with his holster straps, and she wanted to bare her teeth.
“He trusts you, though,” Kay said, surprising her. “The way he looks at you…”
She trailed off, and Rose wanted to ask what way? Because she’d met his gaze again and again, knew intimately the way it could chill or heat her, knew that she could drown in its intensity sometimes. But she didn’t understand it, not really. Not in any way she’d dare name.
“He’ll tell you eventually,” Kay continued with a resigned air. “When he does, I guess we’ll see.”
“See what?” If she bristled, it was only natural. Kay was being strange and distrustful, and Rose was more than a little hurt by it.
Kay glanced up and met her gaze, her own flat and cold as a shark’s behind her lenses. “If you can handle the truth,” she said, and went back to work.
EIGHT
Her tense conversation with Kay in Beck’s bedroom made her think that a crisis point was looming. It came sooner than expected, and not in the manner she’d predicted.
Even as she grew to love her new life, the specter of her old one never loomed too far in the back of her mind. She feared the day that the authorities would turn up on the