Shame the Devil (Portland Devils #3) - Rosalind James Page 0,111

around him. How could she, though? He wasn’t even the father of her child, not for sure, even though he felt like it. Or even though she wanted him to be. She wasn’t sure which.

Annabelle said from the back seat, “Maybe I should have gone to the jail, too. Harlan shouldn’t have had to do that alone.”

“No,” Vanessa said. “You shouldn’t have.”

Jennifer tried to think what to say, how to put this. “Harlan didn’t want you to,” was what she came up with. “He needs to feel like he’s protecting you now. It matters to him, because he couldn’t do it before. If you really want to see your dad, though, you should tell Harlan so.”

“I don’t,” Annabelle said. “I can’t stand to. I feel like I should, though. I feel like …”

Her voice wobbled, and Vanessa said, “Let’s go in the house. We’ll make lunch and talk about it. You can tell me what happened. What’s been happening.”

She hadn’t been home for years, Harlan had said, but she was picking up the big-sister role all the same. And finally, they were out of the car, and Jennifer could leave.

She had to consciously keep her speed down as she drove, the turns announced in the preternaturally calm, robotic voice of the navigation system. She had time, though, to wonder why he had asked her to come instead of Vanessa.

Because he was protective, that was why. Because she was separate from it, and he wouldn’t be dragging her into confronting too much, the way he’d have been doing with his sisters. He was a big brother all the way, and if that just made her like him more, well … it was better than being attracted to a jerk, right?

Her mom had said, one Sunday morning after Mark had dropped her off at home and headed out again to go fishing, “You know, you can ask for more.”

“I don’t think Mark has more,” she’d answered.

“Then that’s your answer,” her mom had said. “Don’t you think?”

You could ask for more, she guessed. That didn’t mean you’d get it. Maybe you didn’t ask because you were afraid you wouldn’t get it, and it would hurt too much to admit you wanted it. So much safer to settle for less.

The drive was only ten minutes, but once again, she’d left the city behind, because the Detention Center was the definition of “in the middle of nowhere.” A slab of gray, windowless concrete set back from a lonely intersection, the land around it so flat, there weren’t even ditches. The road just stopped and the ground began, and it went on forever. There were hardly even trees, because this was the tallgrass prairie. Just with no tall grass.

Maybe it had felt like limitless possibility to those Norwegian settlers, but she wondered. She’d done a school project on Norway once, back in the fourth or fifth grade. She’d paged through library-book pictures of neat, multicolored houses, red and yellow and orange, bright and cheerful, set side-by-side next to a harbor. Spectacular mountains and summer valleys that looked like something out of a fairy tale. And fjords. Lots and lots of fjords. She’d never seen a fjord other than in those pictures, but she knew the word. She’d etched the jagged back-and-forth of the coastline with a knife in salt dough, building up the ridges of mountains down the center and painting them brown with white at the tops, because they’d be covered in ice and snow.

Surely, some of those Norwegian farm wives had stood in this cutting April wind, looked at their new home, and despaired, knowing they’d never see those colorful houses again, or the deep green of evergreens, the icy peaks of mountains, the blue of the sea.

You could farm more easily here, though, she guessed. No need for a sidehill combine, no circular patterns left on the hills after the laborious harvest. Up one row and down the next with no need to slow down, precise and neat.

Maybe if you were Dutch.

When she pushed open the glass door to the reception area, Harlan was sitting on a black plastic chair, his elbows on his knees and his fingers laced together, his gaze on the floor. She thought he didn’t see her, but when she got close, he looked up and tried to smile.

“Hey,” he said. “Sorry to drag you out again. How are you feeling? Getting enough rest? After this, I’ll take you out for lunch.”

She sat down beside him and took his