It was the first time in years—since they’d hired their twentieth driver, to be exact—that Gil had even considered leaving the dispatch office untended on a weeknight. Their fleet was rolling like greased steel, though, and the customers were silent as happy little clams. When he’d arrived, Analise was painting her toenails something called Suck Me Scarlet.
“That’s all there is,” she said, tossing him a note.
D-H Ted called. Has a deal in the works to expand Express Auto Rental into Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. Wants to talk numbers with THE MAN.
When Gil reached for his phone, Analise shook a finger at him. “He’s on a Very Important Conference Call until seven. He’ll call you when he’s done.”
Gil hadn’t heard a peep from anyone else since. He should just go—deal with Ted in the morning—but in addition to being a classic dickhead, Ted was a fickle bastard. If Gil didn’t stroke his ego sufficiently, he might take his new business elsewhere, and there were paychecks to consider, especially now that they’d hired Jeremiah and another mechanic, not to mention the king’s ransom he would be paying Beth when she took over as receptionist.
Thank you, Analise, for making sure the woman didn’t underestimate her worth. This was the trouble with hiring known entities. Sometimes they knew too damn much about how bad Gil needed them.
He stretched, groaning as several vertebrae and both elbows cracked, and checked the time again. Seven fourteen, a.k.a. three minutes after the last time he’d looked.
Call, dammit. If Gil got out of the office by seven thirty, he would be at the Lone Steer before everyone finished their salads.
He drummed his fingers on the desk, wishing he’d remembered his guitar. There was that new meditation program Bing had given him. It would be good practice for competition, forcing himself to relax and focus when he felt more like decapitating Ted dolls.
He also had a knot behind his left shoulder blade that would feel a lot better if he wasn’t slouched in a chair. Maybe later he could ask Carma to work her magic on it.
Thank God for Carma. He wasn’t half the wreck he would’ve been without her. Carma’s van had become his oasis, the one place he could go where no one was asking him anything.
With Carma he could shut his brain down and just exist.
And do his damnedest not to fry her circuits when he was on overload. He’d been trying hard to decompress before he showed up at her campsite: workouts, progressive relaxation, picking a few songs on his guitar, and his latest hobby, packing various parts of his body in ice. Either this shit had hurt a lot less when he was twenty, or he’d been half-buzzed a lot more than he remembered.
It was also a lot more exhausting, but he hadn’t been trying to run a trucking company and raise a kid back then. There weren’t so many people asking him questions that he felt like his brain was being turned inside out and pecked by crows on a daily basis—so that he forgot something like Bing’s birthday. He never forgot that kind of thing, and doing it now did not bode well. If he wore himself too thin, his willpower might be the first thing to give.
All the better reason to close up shop and go have a meal that didn’t come in a takeout bag.
He went out and got the sweater Carma left hanging on her chair for the days when she wore sleeveless sundresses and his mother was having hot flashes. Gil loved sundress days.
Hell, he loved any time he stepped out of his office and saw Carma. He’d caught himself finding excuses to leave his desk just for the sheer pleasure of watching her glance up and smile as if he was the best thing she’d seen all day. He’d even started playing the old game he used to with the pills. How long can I stand to wait until the next one?
So far this week his best had been an hour and half. How the hell would he manage when she went to work at the Patterson ranch full time, and he had to go cold turkey?
Maybe he could talk her into texting him selfies every hour on the hour.
He shoved the CD into the disk tray on his computer, turned up the volume, lowered his aching bones onto the floor and stretched out on his back. When he rolled up the sweater to use as a pillow, Carma’s scent surrounded him.
Three more weeks. Then he’d have to learn how to share. Her time. Her energy. Even her smiles. And selfish bastard that he was, instead of solutions, all he could come up with were excuses to keep her right where he could see and smell and taste her whenever he wanted.
But Carma shouldn’t be locked in a dingy little office. At the clinic she could put all her gifts to use, surrounded by horses and people who needed her particular brand of magic. Helping. Healing. Spreading her warmth.
And ending her days on a horse, surrounded by miles of open prairie.
She was a creature of the wind and sky, and only a complete jackass would try to ground her. He should be thankful she was only going a hundred miles and not clear back to Montana. Besides, if the clinic could capture her spirit and keep her in Texas, Gil would have more of a chance at holding onto her heart.
He glared at the stubbornly silent phone he’d left lying on the desk. He could start by showing up for dinner. Or dessert, at this rate. But at least she’d know he was trying.
Over the high-end speakers, a soothing voice murmured instructions. Breathe in, the deepest breath you’ve taken all day. Breathe out, releasing your worries. Let go of the stress. Feel the tension leaving your shoulders, your neck, and your face.
He closed his eyes and batted away his persistent, whirring thoughts like moths under a porch light, putting all his focus into relaxing, muscle by muscle. Just a few minutes…
“Dad?”
Gil jolted awake, heart pounding, body cold and aching. What? Where…
“Dad!” Quint stood in the door, his face pinched with worry. “Are you okay? Did you pass out?”
Gil pushed up onto one elbow, groggily scrubbing at his eyes. “You’re supposed to be at the Lone Steer.”
“Duh. We waited so long everyone else left. I even talked Carma into dancing with me once, but you still didn’t show up. I texted twice. Carma said you probably got hung up on your call.”
Son of a bitch. Ted. Gil grabbed his phone. Nine twenty. No missed calls. The bastard had stood him up. And since the phone hadn’t woken him…
He’d left Carma sitting alone. Embarrassed her. Made her feel stupid for trusting him. This was not the man he’d made of himself. He did not blow off any kind of a date for any reason. But tonight he’d let Carma down twice over.
Gil hung his head and swore.
Quint sighed. “You can say that again.”
Gil did, as the guilt and the craving hit him like a one-two punch straight to the gut. He clenched his hands around his head, fingers digging into his skull as if he could strangle that damn whisper.
You know what would really take the edge off…
He punched up speed dial on his phone, intending to call Tamela. He could send Quint out to explain to Carma. But he didn’t want a voice over the phone. He wanted a warm touch, and he needed to apologize. Find some way to erase the hurt he’d inflicted. Let her curse him if that’s what it took.
But first he had to get himself there, despite the nearly irresistible urge to go the opposite direction.
He held out a hand to Quint. “I need a little help here. I’m not sure I can get up by myself.”
Let Quint assume he was just talking about his stiff muscles.
They walked side by side to the house. In the driveway, Gil stopped, trying not to even look at the Charger, his potential chariot to hell. “I’m going to talk to Carma,” he told Quint. “Call your grandmother and have her come and stay with you.”
“I’m fine…” Quint began, before something in Gil’s expression stopped him. A flicker of unease crossed Quint’s face. “Anything else?”
Gil looked down at hands that were trembling with the effort to maintain control. “Tell her to keep an eye on the car keys.” He glanced around the lot—there was the tow truck, three semi tractors, plus the service pickups. “All the keys.”
Then he forced his feet to take him away from all those wheels and toward Carma.
* * *
Carma didn’t bother getting undressed, just stretched out on the woven wool rug she’d spread on the ground beside the van and stared up into the trees while she waited for Gil to show up bearing an armload of apologies and excuses. She knew the drill. Some emergency had popped up with some driver, or he’d remembered he had some paperwork that had to be done by morning and he’d lost track of time, or the call he’d been waiting for had taken way longer than he’d expected.
I’m sorry, but this is my job. If I want to win, I have to put in the time.
Oh, wait, that was Jayden—but the basic idea was the same. And it would leave Carma feeling petty and unreasonable for expecting Gil to slack off on her account.
Fitting, that lying on her temporary patio made her feel like a sacrifice in waiting—circled in citronella candles to ward off the mosquitoes, with the cushy pad from a lounger for comfort.
Dramatic much? No one had forced her to come here. No one was forcing her to stay. And the gullible part of her was still hoping Gil would be different. That both his reasons and his apology would make it all right.
She didn’t turn her head when she heard the soft pad of footsteps coming up the trail they’d beaten from his door to hers, just watched in her peripheral vision as he lowered himself stiffly onto the rug. He didn’t say anything for five of her deliberately calm breaths. Then he huffed a sigh. “I should’ve just come to the party and let Ted talk to the answering machine like everybody else.”
“Dickhead Ted?” Carma guessed.
“Yeah. He’s dangling a bunch of new business and seeing how high he can make me jump.”
Of course it would be someone important, the better to make Carma feel guilty for not getting over herself.
Gil hunched his shoulders, gaze fixed on the fingers that worried a snag in the carpet. “And then he didn’t call, so I didn’t wake up—”
Carma swiveled her head to stare at him. “You fell asleep?”
Gil? Who could barely manage two consecutive hours of shut-eye in his pricey adjustable bed with his white-noise machine playing? But he did have that not-quite-there look, as if he’d been woken in the middle of the night.
He found a new spot on the rug to torture, still not making eye contact. “I’m sorry. It was stupid. I should’ve set an alarm or something.”
“You didn’t even hear Quint’s texts.”
“I know. I can’t believe it either.” How exhausted did he have to be to doze off in his office, and not hear the phone that Analise swore was wired directly into his brain? He spread his arms with a derisive smile. “Behold, my natural gift for taking any mistake and fucking it up beyond repair.”
No excuses. No explanations. Just pure self-flagellation. With his defenses leveled by fatigue, she could all but taste the wretched burn in the back of his throat. Gil didn’t make empty promises. And the failure to keep the ones he’d made was eating him up.
He was already beating the ever-lovin’ crap out of himself. He didn’t need her piling on.
She rolled onto her side to face him, pillowing her head on one bent arm. “Why didn’t you tell me you were so tired? I would’ve sent you home to get some rest last night.”
“I think you just answered your own question,” he said, with a pale imitation of his usual smirk.
She rolled her eyes. God forbid he admit that he wasn’t superhuman, capable of conquering the world on coffee and sheer determination. “Not that I haven’t appreciated the, um, services rendered, but to be totally honest, I’m wearing a little thin myself. I wouldn’t mind less Olympic-level sex and more just lying here vegetating together.”
“I’m sorry.” His expression went a shade darker. “I didn’t mean—”
“Gil. Relax.” She laid a hand on his arm, imagining a beam of sunlight passing between them. The calm of a mountain lake mirroring the sky. The muscles under her fingers slackened, then tensed again as he pulled away.
“You shouldn’t waste that on me.”
Excuse me? Carma had been upset and hurt earlier in the evening. Now she was downright pissed. She jabbed her finger into his biceps. “First off, Gil Sanchez, don’t you dare call yourself a waste of energy. And secondly, I am a renewable resource.”
His jaw worked. “But you can be drained.”
“In extreme situations. Or if I don’t give myself time and space to recharge.” She angled her head, but he was still avoiding her gaze. “You are not sucking the life out of me. And as someone recently told me, you don’t get to decide what I need without asking first.”
“Great. On top of everything else, I’m making up my own double standards as we go.” He raked a hand through his hair. “But you were wiped out after that first visit to the Patterson clinic.”
Was that why he’d been keeping her at a distance? “Again, extreme circumstance. Which you would know, if you’d asked.”
“If I hadn’t been too wrapped up in myself, you mean.” He breathed out a weary curse. “Anything else I need to apologize for, while I’m at it?”
Carma thought of the list of gripes she’d compiled at the Lone Steer. Then she looked at the slump of his shoulders, and felt the sheer physical and mental exhaustion smothering him like a dense black cloud.
She squeezed his arm gently. “At the rate you’ve been pushing yourself, you were bound to crash. And yes, I was unhappy with you, but I’ll get over it if you tell me what I can do to help.”
Anyone but Carma might’ve missed the hesitation before he said, “That’s plenty.”
“Bullshit. Tell me what you really need.”
He shook his head. “You’re already doing enough.”
“Gil.” She put an edge in her voice. “Do you really want me to tell Analise that you call her new look Marilyn Monroe meets Marilyn Manson?”
“God no. She’ll come in dripping fake blood just to show me how much worse it could be.”
“Then tell me what you need.”
“I can’t ask…” He raised a hand to ward off her hiss of frustration. “Fine. When you’re gone, it’s a dog pound in there—everybody yapping and whining and growling at each other.”
She scrunched her face. “Worse than when I am there?”
“Last week Mom and Delon and I got so loud during one of our discussions that Max threatened to turn the hose on us.”
Carma blinked. “Max is scared to death of your mother.”
“You see what I mean.”
She nodded, her stomach settling to somewhere in the vicinity of her belly button. Her entire week revolved around Wednesdays. Whenever the chaos in the Sanchez office got overwhelming, she put on her headphones, closed her eyes, and imagined herself at the Patterson ranch, helping one of the amputees rig up a system for saddling a horse one-handed. Or loping across the prairie without another human in sight—or sound.
“Forget it,” Gil said abruptly. “The clinic is the whole reason you came down here.”
Not the whole reason. Carma suspected that even if her grandmother hadn’t given her a shove, she’d have manufactured a reason to come visit Bing—and Gil. No matter which direction she’d wandered since that night, her internal compass had been pointed toward Earnest, Texas.
And she’d known from the moment she laid eyes on him that Gil wasn’t an easy man. That he’d only get more volatile and less accessible in these weeks leading up to the Diamond Cowboy. How much pressure he would put on himself. Just showing up wasn’t enough for Gil. He was in it to win it, one big chance to leave his mark.
Three more weeks. Then the Diamond Cowboy would be over and Gil’s dream along with it, one way or another.
“Okay,” she said. “You’ve got me five days a week, until Beth takes over.”
The wave of relief that washed through him and on to her was worth the balled-up disappointment in her gut. “One more thing,” he said.
She braced herself. What more could he want?
“Can I stay for a while?” He finally lifted his gaze, and she nearly jerked her hand away from what she saw there. A bottomless, hopeless void—one he’d managed to hide from her and most everyone else. “If I leave here now, I’m not sure I won’t keep going until I get to the bar and tell them to give me a double of whatever will kick me the hardest.”
Her heart knocked unsteadily as the demon that lived inside of him sneered at her. Did you really think it would be that easy to take him away from me?
Yes, she had, she realized with a sick jolt. Despite all she knew and all his warnings, deep down she had let herself believe that Gil had conquered his addiction, unable to imagine anything holding up against his raw determination.
This was what he’d tried to tell her. What he shared with Tamela that no one but another addict could ever truly understand. But tonight he had come to Carma instead, and the significance of that choice stole her breath.
“I’m right here, as long as you need me,” she said, barely managing a whisper.
He melted into her with a profound sigh, wrapping an arm around her waist and burrowing his cheek against her chest, a position so unlike his natural state of dominance that it took her a moment to react. Her hand hovered, uncertain, like he was one of her mom’s barn cats who’d sidle close, then bolt if she reached for them. But Gil sighed again as her fingers settled on his back and began to move, slow and reassuring. His breath played warm across the inner curve of her breast, and Carma was suddenly, intensely aware of the beat of her own heart, the air moving in and out of her lungs.
He was still for so long she thought he might have fallen asleep again. Then he asked, “Did Quint really make you dance with him?”
“Yes. Beni too.” She ran her fingers through his hair, smoothing where he’d raked it into spikes. “Great pair of wingmen you’ve got there.”
She felt him smile through the thin cotton of her sundress. “True Sanchez boys.”
They drifted into silence, the night filled with chirrups, hoots, and off in the distance, the eerie wail of coyotes.
Softly, she began to hum along.