AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He couldn’t understand her. She’d seen right through that stomach-churning bogus rape he’d staged their second night out, and she acted as if she didn’t hear half the insults he hurled at her. She was so controlled, so disciplined. What she’d done on her wedding day was clearly out of character. And yet … Beneath those good manners, he kept catching glimpses of something—someone—more complicated. She was smart, maddeningly perceptive, and stubborn as hell. Shadows didn’t cling to her like they did to him. He’d bet anything she’d never woken up screaming. Or drunk until she blacked out. And when she’d been a kid …
When she’d been a kid, she’d been able to do what he couldn’t.
Five hundred dollars. That’s all his kid brother had been worth.
Through the cry of a swamp creature, he heard his eight-year-old brother’s voice as they’d walked up the broken sidewalk to still another foster home, their current social worker climbing the creaking porch steps in front of them. “What if I pee the bed again?” Curtis whispered. “That’s what got us kicked out of the last house.”
Panda hid his own fear beneath a fifteen-year-old’s swagger. “Don’t worry about it, jerkface.” He delivered a sucker punch to Curtis’s scrawny arm. “I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and take you to the bathroom.”
But what if he didn’t wake up like he hadn’t last week? He’d promised himself he wouldn’t fall asleep until he got Curtis up to pee, but he’d dozed off anyway, and the next day old lady Gilbert had told Social Services they had to find someplace else for Curtis.
Panda wouldn’t let anything separate him from his kid brother, and he told their social worker he’d run away if the two of them got split up. She must have believed him because she found a new house for them. But she warned him there weren’t any more families willing to take them both.
“I’m scared,” Curtis whispered as they reached the porch. “Are you scared?”
“I’m never scared,” he lied. “Nothing to be scared of.”
He’d been so wrong.
Panda gazed out at the dark water. Lucy had been fourteen when her mother had died. If he and Curtis had fallen in with Mat and Nealy Jorik, his brother would still be alive. Lucy had accomplished what he couldn’t pull off—she’d kept her sister safe—and now Curtis lay in a grave while the sister Lucy had protected prepared for her first year of college.
Curtis had hooked up with a gang when he was only ten, something Panda could have prevented if he hadn’t been in juvie. They’d let him out long enough to go to his little brother’s funeral.
He blinked his eyes hard. Memories of Curtis only led to other memories. It would be easier not to think if he had music to distract him, but he couldn’t listen to the heavy drama of Otello, Boris Godunov, or a dozen other operas with Lucy around. With anybody around.
He wished she’d come out and talk to him. He wanted her close; he wanted her farther away. He wanted her to leave, to stay, to take off her clothes—he couldn’t help that. Being with her all day would test any man, especially a horny bastard like himself.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose, pulled his cell from his pocket, and carried it around to the side of the house where he couldn’t be overheard.
PANDA KEPT GOADING HER INTO going for morning runs, and even though she held him back, he refused to run ahead. “The second I’m out of sight, you’ll start walking,” he said.
True. She walked for exercise and had a gym membership she used semi-semi-regularly, but she wasn’t a running enthusiast. “When did you make yourself my personal trainer?”
He punished her by kicking up the pace. Eventually, however, he took pity and slowed.
Her conviction that he wasn’t entirely the Neanderthal he wanted her to believe had grown along with her curiosity about him, and she embarked on a fishing expedition. “Have you talked to your girlfriend since you’ve been gone from wherever you’re gone from?”
A grunt.
“Where is that, by the way?”
“Up north.”
“Colorado? Nome?”
“Do you have to talk?”
“Married? Divorced?”
“Watch that pothole. If you break your leg, you’re on your own.”
She pulled some extra air into her burning lungs. “You know the details of my life. It’s only fair that I know some of yours.”
He moved ahead again. Unlike her, he wasn’t out of breath. “Never been married, and that’s all you’re getting.”
“Are you involved with anybody?”
He looked at her over his shoulder—faintly pitying. “What do you think?”
