Ava Gray - Skin Game

He’d requested a second-floor room because he didn’t trust people. At least here on the corner, they would hear someone coming up the stairs; there would be some warning before disaster struck. Rey had tried to insist that they should share a room—that he didn’t like the feel of this place, but Kyra had stayed in enough fleabags to know this one was much like any other, no better, no worse.

“Here, as in Taos? Or here, as in New Mexico?”

“New Mexico,” he answered. “Not far from here, actually.”

“Did you stay in one place?”

A flicker of something passed across his dark, sharp face. “More or less.”

“That must have been . . .” She trailed off, not knowing what to call an experience that differed so vastly from her own.

Part of her wanted to say boring; another part thought comforting might apply.

As a kid, she’d thought her life was one big adventure. Most days, she still thought so. Dismissing profundity, Kyra stepped away from the flimsy, rusted railing and headed for the stairs. His tread followed immediately, giving her the ridiculous impression that he had her back—that she could rely on him.

“It was what it was,” he said, as they reached the car. The look she’d noticed upstairs had winnowed down to something fierce and quiet and sad, like a titanium needle lodged deep.

Before she could rethink the impulse, she went to the passenger side and tossed him the keys. She told herself the offer didn’t serve to cheer him up or ameliorate emotional baggage she wasn’t equipped to deal with. Rey caught the jingle of metal, blessed with her genuine lucky rabbit’s foot, looking astonished.

She muttered, “It just makes sense. You know where we’re going and all.”

“You’re letting me drive?” As if he needed to hear it. “Your Marquis?”

“Yeah,” she said softly. “Be gentle with her.”

“As much as I know how to be.” Rey laid his long fingers atop the roof, and she felt it on her skin. “Let’s go.”

Reyes knew he’d lost all perspective. For a man who had been accused, more than once, of lacking a heart, it was disastrous. The woman had given him the keys to her car, for God’s sake, not the crown jewels. But as he drove, he couldn’t help feel . . . something.

He didn’t know what it was, exactly, because he’d never known anything quite like it before. Whatever it was, it made him keep stealing glances at her from his peripheral vision, just watching the way the wind blew her hair.

It wasn’t too much farther now. The Marquis, being a sturdy car, would make it to the lookout point if he took care with it. And he intended to. Reyes felt strange and unsteady, as if masquerading as himself had weakened him in unanticipated ways. He hadn’t known how dangerous it would be, how thin the line between candor and truth.

The silence lasted until he parked the car. There was nothing but open space and mountains for miles around, topped by a black canopy littered with stars glimmering like crushed ice. You couldn’t find a sky like this over any city in the world.

“It’s so peaceful,” she said.

In the old days, if he’d ever brought a girl up here, if he’d ever had a car, he would’ve first lain with her on the hood and pointed out the constellations. At one point he’d wanted to be an astronomer. If that gambit went well, he’d have attempted to talk her into his backseat. He’d dreamed of that scenario more than once, wishing on stars he climbed to see. But neither cars, nor girls comprised a significant portion of his past, at least not until he was well out of his teens.

“You think Myrna would support us?” He tilted his head toward the hood.

Kyra smiled. “Are you kidding? This is a car built for love. Of course she will.”

To his surprise, she dug into his pocket for the keys, and then went to the trunk. When she returned, she had an old quilt, the sort of thing that people packed in their emergency kits, along with bottled water, kitty litter for traction, and granola bars. Someone, probably the father she’d allegedly killed for his cut of the money, had cared enough to teach her to be prepared.

He no longer wanted to believe she’d done it, even though it complicated his life immeasurably. If he balked at this job, he would forfeit a pristine reputation. And Monroe wasn’t making matters any easier. The last public record he could find for Kyra Marie Beckwith came from a free-clinic vaccination. She couldn’t have been more than eight years old, either.

Oddly enough, it was run by the same corporation that administered the free medical program in the Wyoming town where he’d grown up. Reyes remembered that because he’d spent hours sitting with one of his father’s women, waiting his turn amid crying children. He’d learned early on that crying didn’t do any good.

The woman didn’t have bank records, didn’t have credit cards, so there was nothing to track. All he had to go on came from Serrano, who wanted the woman dead. But Kyra didn’t seem like the kind who would turn on her flesh and blood. The few things she’d said about her father seemed to indicate fondness, and he had a pretty good built-in lie detector.

Could he stake everything he’d built on a feeling? Reyes had no ready answer for that. For now he could only steel himself and stay with her.

She spread the quilt over the hood and climbed up carefully, her back propped against the windshield. Kyra brought her knees up as if to ward off a chill, but he could read her body language. For some reason, she felt uncertain and exposed.

Not waiting for an invitation, he slid up beside her, leaving enough space between them that she shouldn’t feel crowded. But he’d read her wrong. Instead of inching away, she eased closer, as if she wanted to be in his arms. Or maybe he was projecting because he wanted her there. The movement carried her scent to him, more coconut. Reyes couldn’t tell if it was body lotion or shampoo, but it made him think of slick, bare skin, every time he breathed her in.

“I used to hike up here when I was a kid,” he told her quietly.

Self-preservation said he shouldn’t share any more of himself with her—it was fucking dangerous—but his infallible instincts told him that the only way he’d win her trust was by giving of himself. He could get the job done this way, no doubt, but Reyes wondered what the cost would be.

“You must’ve lived in the middle of nowhere then.” Her gaze swept the landscape, for what he didn’t know, and was afraid to ask, for fear of what she might see. More clearly than he wanted, he could picture the way her eyes gleamed during the day, shining like sunlight through honey.

“Not as much as you might think. It was a ten-mile trek. I’d usually stay overnight if the weather was good.”

“How old were you?” she demanded, visibly outraged. “Didn’t anyone worry about you?”

God, he didn’t want to answer. It gave her too much. But with her, it had to be a give-and-take, and she was too canny to be fooled by creative fiction.

“Thirteen. And not really. Not so much.”

She reached for him then, compassion outweighing the caution he saw in the lines of her body. Her fingers touched his. “My dad left me alone at night sometimes. When he was looking for a game. I’d lock the door, put on the chain, and try to sleep.”

Reyes remembered how, when he’d first caught up with her, she’d been sleeping in a pool of yellow light, a small isle against the dark. That was why she still slept with the lamp on. He knew it as surely as if she’d said it, and he knew a quiet burst of rage for the man who’d used her as an accomplice, not cared for her as a father was supposed to. If she’d killed him like Serrano claimed, then maybe he had it coming.