pecs. With tight gold curls and that big, heavy head Brad Kalen looked like fucking Tiberius, riding in to take the throne. She was a little scared of him so she said, ‘There isn’t room,’ but the guys in the back all said like one person, ‘You can sit on my lap.’
Cute Bobby Chaplin was riding shotgun, smart and safe as houses, so why not? If the look Bobby shot her should have told her that he had misgivings, she wasn’t about to pass up a ride. Who wouldn’t want to be seen out riding around these cool guys? She tossed her hair like a cheerleader and jumped into the back.
Stitch Von Harten and the Coleman twins skooched over so she could slip in between Buck and Darcy instead of jouncing along on their knobby knees – too bad about Darcy but who knew he was already doomed? Brad passed the bottle – God only knows what they were drinking – and Jessie knocked one back. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she thinks now, but in the beginning, so crazy and so very much fun, being with these guys – top of the line, leaders of the pack. They were singing, and she remembers riding along thinking, Now I’m in with them, these are my main men.
When you grow up on the outside and something like this happens, you think, Now everything is going to be different. They’ll want you at all the parties now, and not just because you have big knockers. Yeah, right. Brad took a turn nobody expected and her neck snapped. They were at the head of a coral road going nowhere. ‘Shit,’ Bobby said, and Brad said, ‘No shit.’ Then Bobby, who Jessie was so psyched to be hanging out with, said, ‘This is where I get off.’ She remembers just exactly how it sounded. ‘This is where I get off.’ He reached over the seat and grabbed her hand. ‘And you should come too.’ He was asking her to jump down and come along but she was out with the boys and they liked her and by that time frankly, she was too fried to think about that big of a decision.
Oh shit, Jessie thinks, jumping up so fast that she upsets her chair. Done is done. She can’t go back and she can’t make it change. The trouble is, she can’t get rid of it, either, and seeing Walker again today the way she did on a bright Sunday afternoon after so long and just when she thought she was on top of things – she can’t handle it. She just can’t.
It isn’t the pain or humiliation, it’s the knowledge that Walker Pike saw her like that, tattered and bawling in the sand, which he did because it was Walker who ended it. Just when she thought she was going to die – and by God she wanted to die that night and at certain times every night for years afterward – Walker came. Alone by that time, and she can’t know when the others fled – alone, and brutish, vengeful Brad Kalen was rolling her over to try something new when headlights exploded the night and everything changed. A car door slammed and Walker Pike came down on them like the Trojan army and ended it.
Everything stopped in a shower of sand and flying spit and her attacker’s bloody teeth and the hell of it is that every time she sees Walker now, and she does love Walker, Jessie knows he is remembering. No matter how old they get or how pretty she makes herself, Walker is seeing her like that. Like that.
It isn’t fair, she thinks bitterly, he never looked that way at Lucy. In spite of all that.
Distracted and miserable, she finds herself running around the lobby of her hotel thumping tapestry pillows and misting her bromeliads – anything to escape the sense memory, which is overwhelming. She is straightening lampshades when the kid from up north comes out of the elevator with a Jiffy bag under his arm – when did he come in? Was she so wrecked that he went past the desk without her noticing?
Lucy’s boy.
It breaks her heart to see him. Then she looks at his face and her heart goes out, and for more than one reason.
She chooses the easy one. ‘You look like you’ve been hit by a truck.’
He grins, probably because Jessie is smiling. ‘Long day.’
‘Bar’s closed, but I can buy you a cup of