“A little young for you.”
“Jealous?” He flashed a grin that held no happiness behind it, only a grave kind of malice. “How unlike you.”
It was the kind of exchange they’d had a million times. Poking at each other, over and over again. She’d always believed there was a magnetic force between them—drawing them together but sparking if they got too close.
Secrets always kept them from acknowledging what hummed in all these exchanges.
Awareness. Attraction.
She was no idiot when it came to those things, but she didn’t trust them when it came to Caleb and never had. But she’d use them if she had to. Caleb had gone straight, but he was still a man. He was still the man who’d almost killed her father—a fact only the two of them knew. That may have saved her life, but it had also made it far more complicated than it had been before. And it had been plenty complicated before.
Still, she had the upper hand here.
“Why are you here?” he demanded. If she hadn’t known him for almost her whole life, she might have been offended by the demand. It was harsh, but that was Caleb. When he wanted something, his temper frayed, and she knew he wanted her far away, not tiptoeing on his new straight-and-narrow life.
“I need your…” Help wasn’t the right word. She didn’t need his help. She had this covered—she only needed him to look the other way for a while. “All I need you to do is pretend I’m not here.”
His grip on the gun didn’t loosen, but she couldn’t say she was scared. She’d spent her life at the mercy of a man who used his fists or worse to get what he wanted, or to beat out a bad mood, or simply to lay blame. She’d had guns pointed at her, held to her head. So Caleb didn’t scare her in the least.
But jail for a crime she didn’t commit? Yeah, she wasn’t going down like that. She still had one sister to get out of the hellhole the Rogers called home, and she couldn’t do that locked up.
Caleb didn’t say anything for long, stretching minutes of silence. He glared at her, and she imagined the wheels inside his head were turning on overdrive.
“Fine,” he finally said. “I’ll pretend you aren’t here…on one condition.”
She’d spent too many years living in so many people’s conditions. It was foolish that her breath had caught in that pause. Foolish she’d thought he wouldn’t have one. Whatever glimmer of connection between them had never been particularly nice.
But there was a connection, which made her next move harder. Any stranger, any other man, and the overt flirtation would have been easy, welcome, practiced. But under Caleb’s steady blue gaze, she wilted halfway through licking her lips.
She had no power over Caleb, and hadn’t since elementary school when he’d caught her dumpster diving.
Caleb Shaw knew all her secrets, but there was one positive to that.
She knew all his too.
Chapter 2
It had been about five years since he’d had any interaction with Delia Rogers, and yet the emotions inside of him were as familiar as if she’d been by his side every day.
Blue Valley, Montana, was not a place where you could be the same age and not know each other. You went to school together, were in the same classes more often than not. Whether you liked each other or not was irrelevant—you knew each other.
Delia had been in most of his classes and she had run with the group of trouble makers he’d made the center of his world for the term of his adolescence. She had always, always been there, in the midst of almost everything he did, and he had, for a very long time, suffered the same wariness upon being in the same room with Delia Rogers.
He couldn’t remember a time when seeing her, being around her, thinking about her hadn’t sent a wave of feeling through him. A deep, chest-crushing wave of sympathy. A dark, sharp-edged urge to protect. Painful, unwanted lust.
If she had been just about any other woman, the lust wouldn’t be unwanted. It would have been acted on at the hundreds of wild, stupid parties they’d both attended. But long before he’d understood what lust was, one shared moment had always kept him away from Delia.
In the third grade, he’d watched her eat food out of a trash can with the faint mark of what had probably once been an impressive shiner on her cheek. Even at such a young age, he’d known Delia’s life was far more complicated and scary than his would ever be, even when he’d thought the devil was all but in him.
He had food to eat, a dad who protected him, and while he was half convinced there was no choice for him but to be bad, he’d known he was safe.
Delia was not. Had likely never been.
“What’s your condition, Caleb?” Delia asked, her voice edged with exhaustion and…something he didn’t want to hear.