Black Heat (12 page)

He rolled down his passenger window.

"Hey, Roan?"

Go away, go away,
Roan silently chanted, staring straight ahead of her. Angel, however, was curious. She tugged the leash, ears perked up at the sound of his voice.

"That your dog?"

No,
Roan wanted to snap.
Just a random dog that just happened to have a leash on, and I figured I'd let it lead me around and
—

"I mean, of course it's your dog. Angel, right?"

After a few more steps, Roan sighed and gave up. She walked over to Jimmy's open window.

"How do you know my dog's name?" she asked.

"Oh, I...well, I guess I screwed up. Cal told me about her, but he told me not to tell you he told me. So I guess I shouldn't know Angel's name. I'm not a very good liar."

Roan laughed, despite herself. "No, you aren't, that's true. You suck as a liar. You probably shouldn't choose a career that involves lying for a living."

Jimmy smiled, apparently relieved. "I work a couple hundred feet above the ground on a drilling platform. Half the time it's too noisy to talk. Some shifts, no one talks to me at all except to tell me to get out of the way. So I don't think that's much of a risk. So, look. Can you come for dinner?"

Roan blushed. "You're asking me to dinner?"

"I mean—not with
me
." Jimmy looked mortified. "I mean, not with just me, anyway. With everyone. Well, not Zane, he starts his hitch tonight. And Jayne's got book club. So it's just Matthew and Chase and Regina and me. And Cal, of course."

"I can't," Roan said immediately. "He turned me in. To the cops."

"He would never do that." Jimmy looked as shocked as if she had suggested that Cal had set fire to the farmhouse.

Roan wasn't about to admit that she'd had a visit from her stepmother, who in turn had been visited by the chief of police. "He would if he was desperate."

"He tried to
help
you. If you hadn't left your backpack behind, no one would know anything."

"Okay, maybe," Roan conceded reluctantly. "But I still can't come to dinner."

"Matthew made enchiladas," Jimmy said in a wheedling tone. "We've got a fire in the fireplace."

He was being so nice. Almost like a...brother. Like Hank or Justin at the shop, when she let her guard down enough for them to tease her. Roan felt the powerful tug of wanting to belong somewhere, and fought hard to resist it. "I've got food at home. And I don't want to leave Angel by herself."

"She can come. Put her in the back of the truck—we'll give her a soup bone when we get back."

That was what did it. A pretend friend was one thing, but a pretend friend who also was nice to her dog...

Jimmy got out of the truck and made a little bed out of old blankets in the back. He made sure the shell was locked and lifted Angel carefully before they got back in the car. He drove slowly, like he was transmitting precious cargo, and Roan rode in silence, trying very hard not to pretend that she was heading home where she was still welcome.

#

There was singing, an off-key and—as Roan realized after she'd heard a few bars—off-color rendition of an old country standard. A dark-haired man was standing on a chair holding a spatula as if it were a microphone, while a gorgeous blond woman in a vintage dress and fur-trimmed boots laughed and clapped her hands with delight.

"That's Chase," Jimmy said, taking Roan's coat. "And Regina, his girlfriend, who's up from Nashville for a visit."

Chase jumped down from the chair while Jimmy made introductions. No one mentioned the fact that Roan had been on the property before, and Regina greeted her warmly.

"What a beautiful dog!" she said, patting Angel on her silky head.

They were all being so nice to her, smiling and asking her questions and offering her drinks, as if they didn't all know. Roan tried to resist the notion that they were all feeling sorry for her—the little ragamuffin girl, a charity case.

"Where's Cal?" she finally asked, her face aching from smiling so much.

Everyone looked at each other.

"He, uh, had to go," Matthew said, turning back to the stove. "I'm sure he'd be very sorry he missed you. If he knew you were coming."

Roan's heart sank as she turned to Jimmy. "I thought you said he would be here for dinner!"

Jimmy look chagrined. "I thought he would be! He said—I mean, in this weather—who goes out in weather like this? It doesn't make any sense."

"I told him not to," Chase said, looking up from setting the table. "If he'd known you were going to be here, I'm sure he would have stayed."

"Come with me," Regina interrupted, pushing back her chair. "Let's let the boys cook. I'm going to fix us a drink. They can call us when it's ready. That sound okay to you?"

"Um...sure," Roan said. After all, she had nothing to lose, with Cal out in the worsening weather somewhere, while she was left behind in a house full of strangers.

#

Cal walked.

He walked because, when he was done with this errand, he intended to get himself to Buddy's Tavern and order himself a beer and a shot of Jamison’s, and after he drained them he planned to order the same thing again. Tonight he was drinking to the end of a dream that never got off the ground, and he intended to do it right. And—cop or no—any fool knew that when you drank as much as Cal planned to, you don't get behind the wheel. Not when the world was full of people who didn't deserve to pay for your mistakes.

The funny thing—it was kind of hard to think of anything funny at the moment, actually, as the sleet found its way under his rain gear and into his boots, buffeting his face with stinging needles of ice until he couldn't feel his own flesh —the funny thing was that Cal really wasn't much of a drinker. And he'd had Jamison's only one other time in his life. The stuff had burned like acid going down his throat and tasted about like an old sneaker would if you melted it and poured it in a glass.

But there was a reason Cal had drunk whiskey that long-ago day. His dad, the one his grandmother missed so much even though he'd been a worthless son and a worse father and a really, really terrible husband—the man drank Jamison’s. Cal knew that because when he snuck the old photo album down from the top shelf of his grandmother's closet, and pored over the photos of his father as a young man, George Dixon was rarely without a bottle of the stuff at hand. "Irish, you know, on his father's side," his grandmother used to say mournfully, as if lineage alone could explain why first her husband and then her only child had deserted her to roam the world.

Cal didn't forgive his father. Hell no—far from it. But he figured it was the legacy of the old man that had caused him to screw this situation up so badly. Bad decisions were in his blood—and Cal meant to give his bloodline its due, just for tonight. Tomorrow he'd get up and figure out what to do with the shards of his life. But tonight was the night for a reckoning.

Dusk was already falling by the time Cal left the ranch. It was five miles to the edge of town, another half mile to the police station, and by the time Cal trudged the entire way, fighting the snow and slush, losing the feeling in his fingers and toes, he figured it was nearly dinner time. He'd left his watch and his phone on the dresser in his bedroom. He wouldn't be needing them; all he needed was two minutes to tell the chief he was withdrawing his application to the department. He had his wallet, so if he got hit by a car, they'd be able to tell whose remains they were scraping off the road—but the only car that went by him was Jimmy's truck.

It looked like Jimmy was bringing a woman home to dinner, which in other circumstances would have been interesting, since Jimmy rarely noticed the female half of the population, as far as Cal could tell. Matthew was making enchiladas tonight, which was usually quite a production, though maybe not the best night to bring a date home since there was a lot of beer drinking and joke telling and general boorish male behavior. Come to think of it, Jayne had hightailed it to book club—poor Regina, in town to see Chase, had insisted on staying.

Oh, well. Cal wasn't really part of the core group anyway, he reasoned glumly, kicking a chunk of broken asphalt. Back in high school, Matthew and Zane had been best friends, two good-looking kids who were loved by everyone. They played varsity football with Jimmy and Chase, and the four of them took the Red Fork High Bulldogs to the State Championship their junior and senior years. Jimmy helped them study, Chase got them invited to all the parties. A tight crew, with their cute girlfriends and their letter jackets and their bright futures.

Meanwhile, Cal got suspended four times before the start of senior year, and arrested twice. They'd never given him a chance because he never gave them an opportunity.

Don't
, he warned himself. The four men he lived with were his friends, the best he'd ever had. They'd proved over and over again that the past meant nothing. They'd welcomed him as if he was one of their own. Believed in him when he said he wanted to be a cop. Hell, Zane had gone on conditioning runs with him between hitches, and Jimmy had helped him study for the written exam. Matthew saved all the soda cans for shooting practice along the back fence. Even Jayne had offered to take a day off so she could drive him to his final exams and out for a celebratory drink after.

Except...there weren't going to be any final exams. Cal felt sick to his stomach as he imagined the look on his friends' faces when they realized that he'd fucked up again. That he'd blown this last chance and was nothing but a guy with a juvie record and a shortage of prospects.

Don't go there
. The voice was adamant, the same voice that had made him keep going to school even when it would have been easier to just drop out for good; the voice that nagged him to return to his grandmother's house even after he let her down for the hundredth time.

Only something was different now.
No
: Cal wasn't going to lie to himself, to pretend he didn't know what it was. Some
one
, not some
thing
—Roan was different. She had come into his life and showed him there were reasons to get out of bed every morning that didn't have anything to do with the badge he longed to wear, or the black marks on his record. The only thing that mattered was being worthy of her. And if that meant that Cal had to abandon all his other dreams like worthless trash, he'd do it.

He had chosen Roan. The night he'd carried her away from the house where she'd spent her unhappy childhood, the house where she'd returned only out of desperation, he'd made his choice. And he wasn't sorry, either. Now all he had to do was pay.

#

Regina
McCary was just so nice.

Roan couldn't quite figure it out. Regina had some big-deal job in Nashville, as a talent scout or agent or record producer or something. She was here at the ranch because of Chase, but that was all a little vague too. Roan had asked how they met, and the two of them had looked at each other and something passed between them, something that made her heart hurt a little because she'd never had a man look at her that way.

"I wanted to make him a star," Regina said. "And after he turned me down, he took me to see a boy named Mason Crenshaw—maybe you've heard of him?"

"That guy who sings 'Sometimes a Fool'?" Roan said, naming the debut hit that had recently stormed the country scene. "I love that song."

"Yes, well, that happened, and...well, now I seem to be spending more and more time up here. "

It wasn't any kind of explanation—not one that made sense, anyway, but after Cal's roommates got done apologizing for his absence, Regina fixed Roan a drink she called a Sidecar and they went to sit in the family room, away from the busy kitchen, and Roan finally began to relax a little.

"This is delicious," she said, taking a big sip of the citrusy concoction.

"It was popular in the nineteen-fifties," Regina said, smoothing down her skirt. It was full and poufy and perfect. The seam in Regina's stockings was straight and perfect. Her sweater was buttoned just so, leaving a view of her curves that was inviting but prim. Her hair looked like she'd walked out of a beauty parlor on a movie set, like Marilyn Monroe on a good hair day.

Roan was painfully aware that she was still wearing her work clothes. In addition to the grease-stained brown cargo pants, she wore a T-shirt printed with the logo of a pet rescue organization. She'd worn a bra today, thank heavens; some days she even skipped that, since she didn't exactly need one. She didn't have a bit of makeup on and her hair was a disaster—wet weather made it even curlier, and how long had it been since she got a trim, anyway? She put her hand to it self-consciously, and then she caught Regina looking at her thoughtfully, no doubt feeling sorry for her, and she set her drink down a little too hard on the coffee table.

"I should go," she said.

"You should do no such thing!" Regina gasped, putting her hand on Roan's arm. Her perfectly manicured fingers were cool to the touch. Roan hesitated, looking around the family room.

"It's funny," she said. "Nothing has changed in this room."

"Oh, I keep forgetting, you used to live here."