Half Moon Hill: A Destiny Novel Read online

  Duke hated the dejected look on her face and could hardly believe what he was hearing. So he just gave it to her straight. “Daisy, that’s the craziest load of crap I’ve ever heard.”

  Her jaw went slack, her eyes wide. “Huh?”

  He narrowed his gaze on her, trying to think how to explain what he meant. “Look, you’re fucking beautiful. And amazing.”

  She still appeared just as confused. “I am?”

  “You’re smart, you’re sassy, you’re funny as hell, you don’t let anybody push you around, and you know how to take care of yourself. So who cares if you don’t know how to bake a pie? Your cobbler was pretty damn good, though. And who cares if you aren’t a carbon copy of every other chick in town? You do your own thing and I dig that, baby. I like that you don’t try to be like everybody else. I like pretty much everything about you if you want to know the truth. And you make a pair of cutoff jean shorts damn sexy, by the way.”

  Next to him, her expression slowly changed, and he saw some light in those gorgeous brown eyes again. And even if he’d said a little more than he’d meant to, he was glad if it made her see that she was incredible just the way she was and that she didn’t need to apologize to anyone for it.

  She sounded uncharacteristically bashful when she said, “Thank you, Duke. That means a lot to me.” But he guessed he was learning there were a lot more sides to Anna Romo than he ever would have suspected.

  “Well . . . you’re welcome” was all he came up with in reply.

  “So anyway,” she said, “my big solution to all of this was . . . run away to Half Moon Hill. I didn’t know it was running at the time—it seemed like a good idea. And I’m comfortable here. But like I said, you’ve made it more interesting. And better.” The last part came in a shy sort of whisper that kind of turned his heart inside out.

  Duke didn’t answer—he didn’t know what to say. He’d probably already said too much. And after all, an hour ago in the woods, he’d been telling himself all the reasons he couldn’t let himself get any closer to her, and just because he’d come here anyway didn’t mean he suddenly felt differently about that. He didn’t know how he felt on that score—it was all too damn complicated.

  “Your turn,” she said then.

  And his gut tightened. “Huh?”

  “I still don’t really know why you’re living like a vagrant in my woods. And in one way, maybe it’s none of my business. But in another way, it is. And I just spilled my guts to you, on your request. So what’s driven you to such extremes, Duke?”

  Duke knew he could just not answer her. And that would probably be wise. After all, one reason he liked the woods was that it got him away from people. People who wanted to ask him stuff, and find out how he was doing, and try to make him feel better. Because it all just made him think about what had happened—and that was what he didn’t want to do.

  But she’d just bared her soul to him. And the night was quiet—the records downstairs had quit playing at some point and now all that remained was the gentle noise of crickets outside. And they were all alone here, far away from the rest of the world. And though he’d never been the most open guy, if there was ever a time or a place when it felt . . . safe to be open, this was it.

  “I’ve . . . been through some shit, Daisy.”

  “I know,” she told him.

  But did she? Could she know? She could only know what Lucky had probably told her—she couldn’t know all of it, or about the hole it had left inside him.

  “Lucky ever tell you much about the Devil’s Assassins?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Only that it was the biker gang you were in together in California.” She lowered her voice. “And that you had to do bad things.”

  Duke didn’t like thinking about those days much, either—he and Lucky had both worked hard to leave that misspent part of their lives far behind—but . . . “At least then, I felt I had some control. Don’t get me wrong—we lived on the edge every day, not knowing if we’d make some wrong move that would make it our last. But I still knew that whatever happened to me, I was ultimately responsible for it—I’d made it happen, one way or another.

  “And I made some choices I’m not proud of, done things that have made it hard to sleep at night. But I was in survival mode then, and I always did what I had to do to keep myself as safe as possible—and to keep Lucky safe, too.”

  “He told me you saved his life once.”

  Duke nodded. “It was a bad night—the night we ran and left the DAs in our dust.” Should he tell her what happened? He wasn’t sure. It was a big thing—something that could make her see him differently, badly. But it was a part of his life, so . . . shit, he’d just say it. “We didn’t have any choice—we had to run after a bar fight where somebody ended up dead.” He paused, watched for a reaction on her face, but saw none. Tough cookie, his Daisy. And damn, he liked that. “Lucky suffered over that—but me, I saw it for what it was. You choose to live in an environment like that, you know you might not survive. The guy pulled a blade on Lucky, and I wasn’t gonna let that shit go down—so I hit him with a bottle. Then he turned on me and this time it was Lucky who hit him, with a big beer stein. We both did what we had to do, looking out for each other—that was all.”

  Again, he waited for a reaction, and what he got this time surprised him even more. “You put yourself at risk to save him—thank you for that.”

  “I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” he told her. “And see—to me, it all even made a weird kind of sense. You live by the gun, you die by the gun—and I knew, and the other guy knew, that any given day could end the way that one did. It was an ugly way to live, but at least I understood the rules. And then . . .”

  His voice trailed off because his chest went tight. Hell, this still wasn’t easy. He shut his eyes. Kept them shut. Wished maybe she’d just forget the conversation and let them both fall asleep now.

  But when he opened them a minute later, there she was, still waiting patiently for him to go on.

  So he took a deep breath and tried to find the courage to face the one thing in the world that really scared him. And that had really scarred him, too. Not only on the outside, but on the inside.

  He told her, “Then I let a friend die while I stood there and watched.”

  “ . . . death was all around him . . .”

  Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

  Eleven

  It was hard to meet her gaze after that, but he dug deep and found a little more courage and did it anyway. Though he wished they’d turned off that damn lamp now. This would be easier in the dark. Like in the woods. In the dark no one could see you.

  When she spoke, her voice came soft, tentative—she clearly already understood the weight this held for him. “Lucky told me a little . . . about what happened to your friend. But . . . I don’t know much.”

  Duke swallowed anxiously, hating his weakness. He hadn’t known he had that inside him—weakness—until the day Denny Bodkins had died.

  “Denny was older than me—in his fifties. He had a big gray beard and the beginnings of a beer belly. He rode a Harley flathead that Lucky painted for him last year.” Lucky ran a thriving business painting motorcycles for a living. “Denny had Lucky airbrush a pair of dice on his gas tank—said he’d rolled the dice and come out on the winning side. Across the bar one night he told me he’d been into some bad shit when he was younger, but then he met Linda, his wife, and she turned that all around.”

  Duke had been a little envious when Denny had told him the story—he couldn’t quite imagine how a woman’s love could have as big an impact as the one Denny had described, and though he’d never wanted to be tied down, he couldn’t deny that Denny was one of the happiest guys he knew.

  “He and Linda didn’t meet until their forties, and to be honest, I’ll be damned if I could see what he saw in her. Don’t get me wrong—she’s a nice enough lady . . . but I just never saw what was . . . special about her. All I know is
that when she’d walk into Gravediggers and Denny was already there, her smile lit him up like nothing I’d ever seen. Once he told me that she made everything right in his world.”

  The corners of Anna’s mouth turned up slightly, and her eyes took on a soft, dreamy quality. “That’s sweet,” she said.

  And yeah, it had been. But Duke couldn’t smile about it. Because he knew the rest of the story.

  He took a deep breath before trying to finish it. “A bunch of us were on a big ride on a Sunday afternoon. It was the dead of winter, but it was one of those warm, sunny days that come out of nowhere, and it seemed too good to waste, so a bunch of us bikers called each other up, and we met at Gravediggers at noon that day. We headed down across the river at Portsmouth into Kentucky, then rode all the way to Cave Run Lake.”

  It made Duke’s heart hurt now to recall what a great day it had been. Sunny and nearly sixty degrees—rare warmth in this part of the country in January—and it had been good to take to the road with some of the friends who hung out at his bar. There had been about a dozen of them—two couples and the rest lone riders. But now came the bad part, the part he knew would give him nightmares the rest of his life.

  “We were riding too fast coming back. You know how early it gets dark that time of year and we were racing the daylight.” He stopped, shook his head. “I’m not sure whose fault that was—I just remember saying we’d have to haul ass getting home, but that it didn’t seem like a big deal.”

  “Maybe it was nobody’s fault,” Anna suggested. And when he stayed quiet, digesting that, she added, “Sometimes no one is to blame, even when bad things happen. Sometimes things just . . . are. That’s something I’ve come to believe myself anyway.”

  Because it was easier than hating the woman who stole her? Duke wondered, but he kept the thought to himself. He could see the point of not blaming when it wouldn’t fix anything—but he’d found that concept harder to embrace when some of the blame lay with him.

  So he just said, “Maybe,” and went on. “But it was me leading the pack, going too damn fast, when we topped a rise on 23 and there’d been a wreck on the other side.” Just remembering it almost stole his breath. And he suffered the sudden urge to be back in the cabin in the woods, by himself—but he knew he couldn’t run away from this moment the way he’d run away from everything else, and that he had to keep going.

  Though he could no longer meet her eyes. He guessed he just didn’t want to see the horror—or pity, or any other reaction that would show up there. He still wasn’t used to the shame the memory heaped upon him.

  “A Camaro and a heavy-duty pickup had collided just a couple minutes before. The passengers were out of the vehicles, safe and standing off to the side, but the cops hadn’t even shown up yet and the left lane was blocked.” Duke’s breath grew shallow then—it was like his lungs had suddenly stopped working right, like there just wasn’t enough air. But he made himself go on. Because he still felt like he owed it to her somehow. Or . . . maybe making himself say it was just one more way of punishing himself.

  “I managed to veer into the slow lane, but I skidded into the guardrail. And everybody else with us managed to dodge the wreck one way or another, too. Except for Denny.” Breathing became harder and harder. “He slammed on his brakes and slid sideways—his bike went down on its side. Linda hit the pavement and came off the bike. But Denny stayed on it.” He could still see the scene in his mind, unfolding in what had felt like slow motion. Yet . . . in another way, it had all happened so damn fast. “The bike kept sliding—right up under the pickup. And then the truck burst into flames, just like that.” He snapped his fingers, because truly, that was how quickly it had taken place. “And Denny was under it—trapped on the bike, pinned there.”

  “But . . . that wasn’t your fault, Duke. None of it.” Beneath the covers, she touched his arm.

  She hadn’t heard the rest yet, though. And he glanced at her only briefly before drawing his gaze back down. “I was stopped way closer than anybody else, even closer than Linda. And I was running toward the accident when the gas tank blew.” His voice went quieter then—not on purpose. “I saw him, Anna. I saw him in the flames. And he must have seen me, too, because I heard him screaming my name. And Linda was yelling, ‘Help him! Help him!’ And I kept thinking that if I could just get a hand on him that maybe I could get him outta there. But I just stood there. I just stood there and watched him burn alive.”

  She stayed silent for a moment, absorbing it, he supposed. And his gut burned—the same way it had for weeks afterward, giving him the sensation that he was disintegrating from the inside out, being eaten up by tiny embers just like a piece of paper that never really catches fire but slowly crumples to black ashes anyway.

  And when finally she said, “That’s a terrible thing to have gone through, Duke, but you’re not to blame. You couldn’t have—” he stopped her by gently lifting two fingers to her lips.

  “Stop,” he said.

  “Why? It’s the truth. You yourself told me he was pinned.”

  But Duke shook his head. “I think he was—I’m not sure. And I could have tried, should have tried. But I didn’t do anything.”

  He was glad when Anna stayed quiet longer this time—he didn’t want her trying to absolve him; that wasn’t why he’d told her. “I know what you’re thinking,” he went on. “That I wasn’t the only one there, that I didn’t cause the accident, that I’m no more at fault than anyone else.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “But I was the driver in the lead, going too fast. And I was the only one close enough to try to get to him in the end. And I didn’t because . . . I felt the heat from the flames. And I was . . . afraid.”

  “A healthy fear,” she countered. “You’d have died, too.”

  “Maybe that would have been better,” he told her. “If I could have saved him first. Because I don’t have anybody to miss me when I’m gone—but Denny had Linda, and now she’s alone, and none of it makes any sense to me. And . . . I don’t know when the hell I became afraid—of anything. I thought after the Devil’s Assassins nothing could scare me. I thought I’d run the gauntlet, gotten through the bad part, and the rest would be easy now. And then when I least expect it, life suddenly doesn’t make a damn bit of sense anymore.”

  “But—”

  “Shhh,” he told her quickly. “I appreciate you trying to make me feel better, baby—but you can do that all day and I’ll still know inside that I was a coward.

  “And so now you know,” he concluded quickly, more quietly.

  But even now his Daisy kept coming at him. “Not all of it. I don’t know . . . how you got hurt.”

  Duke sucked in his breath—and felt the scar on his face. He saw it like . . . his own version of the scarlet letter, or that he’d been branded by fate—it was the constant physical reminder of what had happened that night, the thing that would never let him begin to forget it. Maybe that had been one more reason to live in the woods. The beard, the lack of mirrors—he hadn’t had to look at it. But coming out of the woods to be with Anna changed that, made him face that reminder on his cheek, like it or not.

  “Yeah . . . forgot that part,” he said quietly. And he supposed that, somehow, it just hadn’t seemed important compared to Denny’s death. “Like I said, I slid into the guardrail—had to slam on my brakes. My bike’s mirror ended up cutting my face. I didn’t even know it at the time—didn’t know it until after Denny had died and the EMTs showed up.”

  She nodded, a guarded sort of sympathy in her brown eyes, and he suffered the familiar sting of feeling . . . broken. In a way the whole world could see. And, of course, right now, only Anna could see—but that was more than enough.

  “I still don’t really get why you’re living in that shack, though,” she told him then. “Or why you sold the bar. And Lucky thinks you’re with your family in Indiana.”

  Yet one more small sting shot through him. God, she was full of questions. />
  Another uneasy swallow before he said, “I sold the bar because I couldn’t face Linda or anybody else who knew and loved Denny. I couldn’t just . . . live life like it was normal again. It wasn’t normal. Pouring drinks for people seemed . . . fucking meaningless when Denny was in the grave and Linda could barely even make it to the funeral. I just didn’t want to do it anymore.”

  “What about your family? Did you go to Indiana?”

  At this, everything inside him stiffened. “That didn’t work out.”

  “And then . . . ?”

  “Then I just started riding. With no real idea where I was headed. And I ended up back in Destiny—I guess the bike knew the way. But since I’d lived in the apartment above Gravediggers, I didn’t really have any place to go when I got here.” Aw shit, that sounded pathetic.

  “You could have called Lucky,” she suggested timidly.

  Yet he only shook his head. “I was too raw inside—couldn’t deal with seeing anybody.” And that fresh rawness had come from what had happened in Indiana—but he’d said too much already and he just wasn’t gonna go there, so he moved on. “Then I remembered Lucky once telling me there was an old cabin in the woods here—said he’d hung out there with friends, drinking, when he was a teenager. When I found it, I figured it was a good enough place to stay for the night. And when I woke up the next day, I . . . guess I liked how quiet it was. And I kept planning to leave, but . . . one day turned into another, and another. Guess I was just too beat down inside to keep trying.” His heart felt tired, remembering those first few days here. Denny’s death, his visit to Indiana, the way he looked now—it had all added up to make him feel like some kind of monster. And that had been pretty damn immobilizing.

  She stayed quiet and so did he, and he realized the whole story—even without the part about going home—embarrassed him a little. Now she knew he was weak, too. “I hope you don’t have any more questions, Daisy, because I’m about spent here.”