Demon Night

No, I could feel this without looking into you.” He caught her chin when her cheeks flared with heat and she’d have turned away. “I’m the one who ought to be embarrassed, Charlie. I ain’t doing right by you. But bending you over the tailgate won’t be doing right, either.”
    Oh, Lord. She’d said that? “I actually meant the…the…” She waved her hand at the front of the truck. Then the visual struck her, and she ground her teeth together before the laugh escaped.
    He brushed a strand of hair from her face and seemed relieved by what he read there—his shoulders not so straight, his muscles not so rigid beneath his clothes. “I’d give anything to bend you there or just about anywhere, but I suspect the one relying on someone else and needing too much would be me.”
    Charlie closed her eyes, unsure if she was being slow, if he wasn’t making any sense, or if she was rattled by his proximity. Their position was too intimate, the height of the seat putting them almost on eye level, his big body taking up too much space in the door. She’d been half-outside when he’d appeared in front of her—he only had to step forward and he’d be between her legs.
    But he had “indirect” perfected, so she’d bet it wasn’t just her. She met his gaze again and said, “This isn’t laying it out straight, Drifter.”
    His jaw tightened for an instant, then he was shaking his head. “All right. I ain’t good at storytelling, so I’ll just say that what I told you at Cole’s was mostly true. And that in order for a man to become a Guardian, he’s got to sacrifice his life to save someone else’s.”
    What had he told her at Cole’s? Her brow furrowed, until she realized she was holding the two encounters separate in her mind.
    Oh, Lord—he hadn’t told her as himself, but as the older gentleman. “Your brother’s life?”
    He nodded, tension carving lines beside his mouth. “I figured he got out. There’s no way he could have been living, so I didn’t expect—” He paused and lay his forearm on the top of the door frame. His gaze searched her face. “And I’m losing you again, most likely because I can hardly think straight about it myself.”
    She’d seen and spoken with enough grieving customers to recognize it in him now. “It’s okay. I’ll catch up.”
    He swallowed, looked down at his boots. After a minute he said, “We’d gotten into a spot of trouble, Caleb and me. And there wasn’t a way out of it—even before we rode into Eden. But the opportunity came for me to make a bargain, and for him to get out.” He lifted his head. “Not just out of Eden, Charlie, but to get to California or Oregon, and start over. When the two of us were together, no one could mistake us for anyone else. But Caleb alone? He could get by. And it was a chance for him to get back to the life he should have been living. So before I took the poison, I made him promise he’d give up what we’d started. Made him swear he’d do right again, have a family.” He reached up, touched his lip. “Fair had to beat the promise out of him.”
    Charlie’s stomach was a hard knot, and she didn’t understand all of what he was talking about, but she nodded.
    “We had no inkling that Michael would know when someone sacrificed himself like that—and Caleb never could have known that I became a Guardian, because the sheriff had let him go before the poison killed me, before Michael showed up. So Caleb took off with that promise, and me dying in a furnace of a jail cell so he’d have another chance…and he went right on back to thieving. He got himself hanged a month later.” His thumbs slipped in low on his suspenders, and his throat worked a couple of times. “I got the news yesterday morning.”
    Gingerly, Charlie ran her fingers along his left suspender until her hand rested against his. A light touch, a connection that wasn’t asking or taking anything.
    He seemed grateful for it, though; he turned his wrist to cup her hand in his palm. “I can’t help but think that maybe my sacrifice didn’t mean anything to him. Leastwise not enough to quit, to do what he’d sworn he would. So it’s tore me up some, Charlie. It would feel awful good to slip into your arms, and I want you so bad I’m damn near dying for it. But I don’t know that my head’s on straight after the blow Caleb laid on me. And I don’t know if I’d be taking what you’re offering for wanting you or because I’m hurting.