The Heart of Christmas (18 page)

But just as he stepped away and started to open the door, he saw a car drive by—going very slow—and stop at his house.

Quickly closing the door again, he drew the dead bolt.

“What is it?” Leigh asked.

He didn’t answer. He hurried over to the window, where he watched four men get out. From the way they stalked purposefully to the house, sheltering something under their jackets, he guessed they were carrying guns.

21

B
anging on the door woke Eve from a restless sleep. She sat up, wondering if she’d imagined the noise—or mistaken it for something in one of the many dream sequences she’d been having.

Then it came again. Solid and distinct. Someone wanted to rouse her. It couldn’t be her parents, could it? It wasn’t even six in the morning!

Slightly anxious—she’d had such a bad night already—she grabbed her robe and her cell phone and crept out to the living room. The sun hadn’t yet made its appearance. Maybe it wouldn’t make much of one today. Judging by the wind howling through the eaves, the weather hadn’t cleared since the previous night, when Dylan and Cheyenne had paid her a visit. She wasn’t sure if it was still snowing, but the storm certainly wasn’t over.

She went to the window and peered out. The snow had stopped but she could see no car in her drive.

“Who is it?” she called, her finger hovering over the send button for 9-1-1.

“It’s me,” came the response.

Eve’s heart nearly dropped to her knees. Brent! No,
Rex.
She had to get used to his real name—but first she needed to confirm it.

“Rex?”

“Yeah.”

She managed a slight smile after she opened the door. “It’s nice to finally meet the real you.”

“I’m sorry, Eve. I’ve tried to stay out of your life.”

He was pale and drawn, much paler than she’d ever seen him. She wondered if he was sick but figured it was exhaustion. His hair had been whipped around and was noticeably tangled, he had more beard growth than usual and his eyes were bloodshot. “I don’t want you out of my life,” she said, and pulled him inside, where it was warm.

“I can’t stay,” he told her. But she ignored that. He needed sleep and good food and a little TLC before they even considered anything else.

“You look like you haven’t been to bed tonight.”

“Not yet.”

“Not
yet?
It’s nearly morning!”

She began to lead him to her bedroom, but he pulled back. “You’d be smarter to send me away. It should be safe for you now—for both of us—or I wouldn’t be here. But at some point they’ll find me again.”

They.
She didn’t know who “they” were. And she didn’t know what he might have done, if anything, to cause the danger he was in. But she didn’t dare ask him. Not right now. There was something ragged about him, something watchful and defensive, that made her heart ache.

“We’ll talk about that later,” she said. “After you’ve had a chance to rest.”

“When do you leave for work?”

“I have to be there by nine, so if I’m gone when you wake up, just make yourself at home and shower, eat, whatever. Do you need to borrow my car?”

“No. I have a rental. It’s parked down the road half a mile or so. I didn’t want your parents to see it and wonder what was going on.”

“And your bags?”

“I don’t have much, but what I do have is in the car.”

He let her strip off his shirt. But when she started to unbutton his jeans, he stopped her, and she realized it was because he had a gun.

She froze as he removed it, but he didn’t immediately set it aside. He paused, as if he thought the sight of it might upset her enough that she wouldn’t want him to stay. “It’s for self-defense, Eve,” he said. “I would
never
hurt you. You believe that, don’t you?”

She did. It wasn’t as though he was threatening her with it. But there were other reasons he possessed such a deadly weapon, and they scared her. “Have you ever had to use it?”

She’d known he was in trouble, and that it was serious trouble, but a handgun? That brought the reality home. He was talking life and death!

Instead of answering, he slid the weapon back into his waistband. “I shouldn’t have come here, shouldn’t be including you in my problems.”

Part of her, the part that recited what her parents and her friends would most likely say, told her she should let him go. But the other part, the part that cared about him and felt his exhaustion and his pain, couldn’t bear the thought of his leaving without the rest and comfort he needed.

“Don’t go,” she said. “I admit it’s a leap of faith for me to have a gun in the house, but...put it down and come to bed. I want you beside me. I want to hear your heart beating and know you’re with me, solid and safe.”

When he hesitated, she reached for the gun, but he guided her hand away and put it on the nightstand himself. Then Eve took off her nightgown. It wasn’t because she wanted to make love. She didn’t feel he was emotionally capable of that right now. She wasn’t sure
she
was. But she craved the feel of his skin against hers and, when she crawled in with him, he seemed just as eager to be close.

“I love the way you smell,” he murmured as he gathered her to him.

She liked a lot more than that about him. She couldn’t say why. She didn’t know him all that well—not to mention that what he’d originally told her wasn’t true. But she felt satisfied when she was with him in a way she’d never been satisfied before. It was almost as if something had been missing in her life, and he provided it. “I’m glad you came back,” she said, and shifted to press her lips to his temple.

He seemed to drop off almost instantly but Eve didn’t. She didn’t want to sleep. She knew these minutes were numbered, that she’d be lucky if he stayed more than a day or two. So she lay there, listening to him breathe and memorizing the features of his gorgeous face as the sun came up. She wanted to store every detail in her memory, since memories were probably all she’d ever have.

Unless he’d given her a baby...

* * *

When Rex woke up, the house was quiet. Eve had to be at work. He lifted his head to gaze around the empty bedroom, with all its feminine frills, then fell back onto the pillow when he remembered how badly The Crew had shot up his house and Land Rover last night. They’d assumed he was at home.

He needed to shower so he could run his errands and, when she returned from work, have her take him to the airport. He had to get out of California as soon as possible. He also needed to figure out how he was going to sell his business and his house and then rebuild his life. He knew he should be grateful that he’d survived the night, that his neighbor had given him reason to leave his house at that precise moment. But it was difficult to face the destruction of everything he’d built—especially since he’d thought he’d finally reached a point where this wouldn’t happen again. Until the final message from Mona, he’d believed that as long as he was careful, the past would continue to fade away.

He shouldn’t have assumed he was clear of it. Then maybe the disappointment wouldn’t taste quite so bitter. He’d never escape The Crew entirely. Which was why he couldn’t linger in Whiskey Creek.

A noise at the front door made him sit up. Although he saw no way The Crew could have traced him to Whiskey Creek, he was rattled enough by what had taken place to grab his gun.

“Don’t worry, it’s just me!” Eve called out. “I’ve brought you some lunch!”

He noted the caution she’d used because she knew he was armed.

“I’m still in bed,” he called back, and placed his Glock in her top drawer so she wouldn’t have to see it the second she walked into the room.

She appeared in the doorway, looking as beautiful as ever in a fitted gray dress with black trim and black stockings. “Good. I hope you slept well. You needed it.” She smiled at him. “You hungry?”

“Starving.” He let his gaze range over her, starting with her dark hair and those pretty cornflower-blue eyes and moving over her slender figure. “But maybe we could have dessert first.”

Instead of capitulating, she raised an eyebrow. “I sense some avoidance going on here. Some
more
avoidance, I should say.”

He grimaced. “Does that mean you want to talk?”

“What do you think?”

“We have very limited time. Why waste it?”

“Finding out what’s going on wouldn’t be a waste to me.” She came over to sit beside him on the bed. “Are you going to trust me enough to tell me?”

He was so used to hiding his past, his true identity and so many of the events that had shaped him. It felt strange to even consider opening up. And yet all those secrets created such a heavy burden. She was the first woman since Laurel to know even this much about him, little though that was.

“What’s the use of keeping me in the dark?” she prodded, as if she understood the battle he was waging in his head. “Why not let me know the real you?”

With a sigh, he shoved the pillows against the backboard to give his spine some support. “My real name is Rex McCready. That’s the name I was born with. Since then I’ve been Perry Smith, Jackson Perry, Taylor Jackson—” He’d started to tick them off on his fingers, but she interrupted.

“And Brent Taylor. I think I see a pattern here,” she said with a wry smile.

“I figured it would be easier to remember my own name if at least part of it was familiar.”

She nodded, encouraging him to continue. He grimaced again. “Sometimes even I don’t know who I am.”

“That goes deeper than a name.”

“Maybe.”

“What I need to know is
why,
” she said. “Why all the different identities?”

This was the tough part, the part he preferred to avoid. “I did something when I was a teenager, Eve, something I will always regret.” He still couldn’t bring himself to go into any detail about Logan’s accident. “It cost my family a great deal, drove a wedge between us and filled me with self-loathing. I just...couldn’t cope with it, with the fact that I was responsible for something so tragic. There are still moments when it eats me up inside.” His voice dropped in anguish. “I would give
anything
to turn back the clock, but...”

“That’s impossible,” she said softly.

“Yes.” He’d hoped his answer had seemed contemplative. Resigned. That was what he was striving for. But she somehow understood who he really was, and that made it harder to keep the truth locked in the “do not open” compartment in his brain.

Her eyes searched his face. “You’re not going to tell me what that tragic event was?”

He summoned the mask that normally hid his deeper emotions. “It doesn’t matter, not to the rest of the story.”

She must have heard the “no” in his statement because she didn’t press him on that. “So this self-loathing caused you to act out.”

He nodded.

“In what way?”

“I started getting into fights, ditching school, taking drugs. First it was pot. Then I worked my way up to harder drugs. Pretty soon I was dealing to support my habit. And not long after I turned eighteen, I got busted.”

“And then you did time.”

He rubbed a hand over his face. “Yes.”

“Dylan guessed as much. Said you were...leery.”

“It’s that obvious, huh?” He chuckled without mirth. “Prison is a hell of a place for a kid as angry and self-destructive as I was, because it only makes you angrier and more self-destructive. I probably would’ve been killed if I hadn’t joined a gang called The Crew.” Which was what made it so ironic that
they
were the threat now.

“A
gang?
” she repeated.

He tried to comb some of the tangles out of his hair with his fingers. “I can imagine it sounds shocking to someone like you, someone who’s never encountered what I’ve encountered. But...prison is a world all its own, Eve. Inside, you either click with other guys, or you face all comers alone—and you’re not going to last very long doing that.” She didn’t need to know
all
his reasons for joining, not the least of which was that he hadn’t expected to reach his thirtieth birthday. If he wasn’t going to survive, the future was of no concern to him. There didn’t seem to be any reason
not
to join and at least take a spot at the top of the food chain for a while.

“You’re saying it was a necessary evil.”

“Felt that way at the time. But these men, these gang members, they become your brothers. What you would live and die for gets twisted, but you love them so much that you’d give your life for them. I felt like I was unworthy of my real family, and yet here was this fiercely loyal group of brothers willing to accept me, and they weren’t any better than I was. It was the first time in ages that I felt as if I belonged to something important, was someone who mattered. I wasn’t about to lose that.”

“But...”

“Then came Virgil.”

“Another inmate?”

“Yeah. After a few months, he became my cell mate.”

“He was in this gang, too?”

“Eventually.” He rested his head against the backboard as he talked. “He was in prison for murdering his abusive SOB of a stepfather.”

She blanched. “This...friend of yours, he
murdered
someone?”

“No. But he served fourteen years before they found the real killer. That was some sad bullshit.” He felt his muscles tense. “I still feel angry at the system when I think of what he went through—for no good reason. Like me, he was only eighteen when he went in. He’d gotten there first. He’s a few years older than me. But he was different, a good person, and we became close. Then he was exonerated.”

“So he got out before you did.”

“Not by much. I was released weeks later. There was just one problem.”

“What’s that?”

He took her hand. He knew this wasn’t what any woman would want to hear. “Once you join a gang, you’re in it for life, Eve. They don’t let you walk away.”

“You wanted to leave The Crew once you got out of prison?”

“Not me. Not at first. Like I said, those guys were the only family I had. My own family had basically disowned me. But Virgil had a new chance at life. He wanted to start over, and he knew he couldn’t do that unless he had some way to protect his sister.”

She stared down at their entwined fingers. “How did his sister get involved?”

“If the gang can’t get to you, they’ll take out the people you love—hurt you however they can.”

When she recoiled, he feared he’d gone too far. But he’d never told anyone this story, and he had to finish. He didn’t want to feel as if he was still lying to her by telling only part of the truth. It was important to find out if she could still look at him the same way once she saw what lay behind his pretty face.