He swallowed and looked down at their joined hands then turned his gaze to the desert for several long moments before bringing it back to her face. The sober man was taking over and the Russ who’d seduced her at the Bloated Boar fought him valiantly, warred to communicate with her still.
And then he did.
“I promised myself a long time ago to wait to bed my woman until after our wedding,” he said simply. “We’re getting real close to me breaking that promise and I don’t want to, not with you. You’ve been hurt enough. You’ve had enough promises made to you and broken. I don’t want something to happen to get in the way of the wedding even for a minute, so…” He hesitated. “I want you badly. I also very much want to marry you. But I don’t have a lot of control left on the want you part. So if we could just get in the damn car and break the speed limit to Vegas I’d appreciate it.”
Chapter 4
Puzzled, Janina stared up at her fiancé, trying to sort out the subtleties of what he hadn’t said.
And then she did.
Stunned, dumbfounded, she swallowed. Hard. Waited, had he said? As in waited? As in there was nobody before her? Not even…
Maddie?
With all that history, all that time, all that everything?
She looked up at him for confirmation. He shrugged.
“Why?” Not, perhaps, the most sensitive thing she might have said, but her mouth wasn’t taking orders from her brain at the moment. “How?”
He snorted. Grinned. “Opportunity. Desire. Your lack of availability at the…ah…fitting moments. My lack of verbal…um…eptitude in the dating game. Never got around to it I guess.”
“That’s not a word.” Obviously she was in shock and couldn’t be held accountable for what she said.
He canted her an odd glance. She deserved it. “What’s not?”
“Eptitude.”
Another snort. “Sue me. It fits.”
“But, Russ, what about Maddie?”
“Who?” The uncharacteristic looseness, the remaining uninhibitedness brought about by his beer consumption faded. “What?”
“Everybody said…they knew…they thought—” She floundered, lost in repeating gossip from the trial.
Thirteen-year-old gossip that had followed him from the moment he’d started defending Madelyn Thorn from an overabundance of small-town speculation. Because he’d known Maddie since long before either of them came to Winslow.
He went rigid beneath her hands. “Everybody knew nothin’,” he said harshly. “Everybody knows nothin’. Not about Maddie, not about me. What they think or thought’s got nothin’ to do with anything.”
She was trembling under his hands, the wide brown eyes looking up at him, the same brave but frightened ones that had peeked out at him over her mother’s shoulder, her body half hidden behind her mother’s skinny, unprotective frame. Oh God, he’d never been able to get past that picture of her, of the girl who’d taken down a shotgun and followed him to make sure he didn’t get hurt when he went into a lethal situation alone.
Of the woman who didn’t know he knew what she’d done for him. And therefore by default for Maddie.
“Ah, screw it.”
“Russ, don’t. Wait—”
Shaken, sobered—and sobered up—he released Janina and slammed shut the wagon’s rear door, shoved himself away from everything he wanted-needed-craved, and turned to long-leg-it to the highway’s edge. Emptiness crossed by electric lines and black ground spotted by straggles of vegetation and lumps of sandstone against a spectacular rising-sun backdrop—Arizona at its finest—spread out before him. He saw it and didn’t.
“Russ!”
He heard but ignored her.
“Russ, damn it.”
She was angry, but still he didn’t turn. There’d been reasons beyond simple choice he’d kept body, soul and self to self where women—and Winslow’s women in particular—were concerned since he’d taken Maddie’s father down.
Since the publicity from the trial had raked him and his lifetime connections to Maddie over, dissected him and them, and changed him.
There was more that he’d protected Janina from than him simply thinking she was too innocent for him.
More that he’d forgotten in his annual drunks with his brothers than he realized.
When he’d burst into the Thorns’ trailer that night to find Maddie disfigured, torn up and bleeding to death, he’d also found her holding the bloody weapon that had been used to shoot her brother over—and over. Cherry on the job that he was, he hadn’t thought about gunshot residue or anything else that might clear her—he’d thought only about the horror in front of him, and he’d taken the weapon from Maddie, cleaned her fingerprints off it and thrown it into Lake Havasu on his next trip home to the difficult-to-reach Havasupai reservation he’d grown up on. He and Maddie had never talked about what had really happened, because she couldn’t remember, so he simply covered up what he assumed happened at her hand. She’d suffered enough—nothing could be proved….
But the suspicion he’d brought on himself by standing by her, being her friend, had been considerable. She’d been used, abused and pimped out by a pedophile since she was twelve and Russ hadn’t known, but the looks he’d gotten when the defense got him on the stand and asked him about Maddie, about knowing her in high school, about the things she’d done for his football, basketball and baseball teammates, and that they insinuated she’d done for him when she hadn’t because he wouldn’t let her, had been enough to label him for life.
The term conflict of interest had been flung about when his captain found out about Russ’s past relationship with Maddie. Cover-up was what the newspapers wondered when it couldn’t be proved definitively one way or another whether or not Maddie had killed her brother that night in self-defense, or someone else had done it.
Small towns had long memories for gossip and innuendo and Winslow was no different than most. The couple of times he’d gotten his verbs together in coherent order and thought about dating respectable town women way back when, he’d been discouraged from it in no uncertain terms by “right-thinking” moneyed types like Buddy Carmichael’s father, who’d…
No. He didn’t like remembering what he’d worked hard to put aside. He didn’t want Janina thinking what others thought—used to think—about him, ever. He didn’t give a flying fig in hell about anyone else and never had, but Janina…
Was standing in front of him. Slapping his chest with the edge of her fist—she winced—and kicking him once in the shin with the side of her foot for good measure to get his attention. He looked down at her, bemused.
“Hey,” she said, almost loudly enough to wake the dead. “You got a problem I oughta know about, maybe you should tell me before we get to Vegas.”
Russ frowned and canted a brow, remained silent. He was good at silent. Best to stick with his strengths in unfamiliar situations.
Janina sighed. He’d startled her with his admission and she didn’t do surprise or silence well. Both were designed to elicit comments that could leave her with her foot in her mouth. This time she had a feeling she’d stuck them both there.
“So.” She tapped a foot, wondering where he wanted to be. To go. Trying to decide where she should be. Because reckless or not, the road to