The Deep Wood (Sunshine Walkingstick Book 2) Read online

  A passel of booted feet stomped down the driveway behind us at a steady run. The painter swung its head toward me and dragged a paw along the ground in my direction, then twisted around and disappeared.

  Jazz and Riley and three or four other folks surrounded us before I could draw another breath. As Jazz enveloped BobbiJean in a hug, Riley cupped my shoulders and leaned down, putting his face even with mine. “You ok, baby?”

  “Yeah,” I croaked out. “BobbiJean got scared.”

  “We heard.”

  I nodded, no idea why. Riley pulled me into a hug, one hand around my shoulders, the other cupping the back of my head, and a great trembling overtook me, shaking me so hard, my fingers fumbled with the lapels of his sport coat in my futile attempt to latch on to the only solid thing I could find.

  “It’s ok, baby, it’s ok,” he murmured, but I shook my head. It weren’t ok. Johnny Walkingstick was right. Something was wrong in the deep wood, something terrible bad, and I weren’t so certain it had anything to do with the monsters I been hunting for so long.

  Chapter Seven

  We left soon as the bonfire was watered and sanded, and the food rounded up. BobbiJean helped me stuff Riley into his Range Rover. Turns out, the sober brought on by BobbiJean’s scream lasted about as long as it took to walk back up the hill, not even long enough to help clean up.

  Funny how most of the men was too tipsy to lend a hand.

  I drove real careful like to the trailer. Riley sprawled across the passenger’s seat, his eyes closed, his breathing deep and even. By the time we hit Clayton, I come to a Mount Everest sized decision. No way was I leaving him at his apartment all by his lonesome, not in the shape he was in.

  I turned right onto Hwy. 76 and headed home, and a while later, parked his SUV beside the IROC. I turned off the ignition, took a deep breath. It’d been a long time since a person of the male persuasion stayed overnight in the trailer. Family only, since Daddy died, and never a man I was dating.

  Men didn’t stick around long enough to earn their way into my roost.

  Riley’d stuck, sorta. And besides. We was friends. Couldn’t leave a friend to fend for himself, what with me being the one responsible for bringing liquor to the wedding.

  “What’re we doing here?” Riley said, his voice soft and a little slurred.

  I shifted around in the driver’s seat. His head rolled toward me and his hazel eyes opened a bare slit. I patted his thigh, gentle in deference to the ghost of hangovers yet to come. “I thought it best you sleep here tonight.”

  His mouth relaxed into a loose, happy grin. “I knew you’d come around.”

  I snorted. Yeah, right. Like he was in any shape to take advantage. “C’mon, big feller.”

  I dropped his keys on the seat, left our extra clothes and such in the back, and half pulled, half pushed ‘til he was outta the car and draped over me.

  Now, I ain’t exactly a short woman, but I weren’t no bigger’n a cricket compared to Riley, and was a mite lighter to boot. He was over six foot tall. Worked out all the time, too, so it was scrawny ol’ me versus nigh on two hundred pounds of solid man.

  I managed to balance him with an arm around his lean waist and one of his arms slung around my shoulders. We teetered and tottered across the parking area, up the steps, and into the trailer. After what felt like a coon’s age, I finally maneuvered him down the narrow hallway to the bedroom, flicked the light on with my elbow as I passed the switch, and dumped him on the bed.

  He looked up at me and grinned. “It’s about time you took me to bed.”

  I grinned back, couldn’t help it. Riley drunk was cute as a button. “Sit up and let me get you undressed.”

  “Thought you’d never ask.” He struggled onto an elbow, hindered more than helped me get his coat and shirt off, then flopped back onto the mattress, still grinning like a loon. “Touch me.”

  “I’m a-touchin’ you, sweetheart.”

  Probably not the way he wanted me to. Not quite the way I wanted to neither. Lordy, was it hard resisting temptation. His chest was muscled and tanned. A red-gold patch of hair scattered across his pectorals and arrowed down into a narrow line bisecting his flat tummy before disappearing into the waistband of his slacks.

  A fine grid of scars radiated along the top of his right hip, just visible above his pants. Them he earned serving Uncle Sam in Afghanistan. I never seen ‘em before, and now that I had, nausea tightened my innards into a knot. Dear Lord, the pain he musta been in when that shrapnel dug into him, and again when it was dug outta muscle and bone. If he hadn’ta got help right away, how much worse would it’ve been? Would he’ve lost his leg? Been permanently disabled? Would he be able to walk now a’tall, let alone move around as easy as he done?

  Riley tucked an arm behind his head and dropped his free hand onto mine. “Don’t stop.”

  I swallowed down the bile coating my throat, determined not to let my upset show. No sense hurting him again over something he couldn’t help.

  I mustered a suspicious, side-eyed look and aimed it at him. “You don’t sound near as drunk as you act.”

  “Too drunk to drive,” he said, and squeezed my hand. “Unbutton my pants.”

  “Don’t get no ideas.”

  “Baby, I’ve had ideas about you since you got boobs.”

  I snickered. As if. “Settle down there, Romeo.”

  But it weren’t so easy to undress the rest of him as it shoulda been. I pulled off his socks and shoes, tucked the latter outta the way, and sat down beside him on the bed, staring at the fly of his slacks like it was the devil come to get me.

  In a way, I reckoned it was. Or not it exactly, but what was hiding behind it, already stirring if looks could be believed, and how’d that happened with Riley at least two and a half sheets to the wind?

  Time to get it over with. I blew out a long breath and set my fingers to work on getting his pants off. They trembled and shook like saplings under the breeze, and my skin brushed his ‘long and along. He was smooth, soft, and too warm in the room’s slight chill. I tried to ignore it, tried to concentrate on the task at hand. I brung him here to keep an eye on his inebriated self, not to fondle him.

  I finally managed to get the button undone, fumbled with the zipper, and pulled it down over his manhood, partway thankful he weren’t full on aroused and a smidgeon disappointed, too.

  Which was plum ridiculous.

  He helped me wiggle his pants off. Soon as they landed in a heap with the rest of his clothes, he snagged my arm and pulled me down on top of him. “Sleep with me.”

  I oomphed and spit hair outta my mouth, then raised up on my elbows and stared down at him, face to face. He smelled like that cologne of his, woodsy and masculine, tinged with the barest hint of corn liquor. I narrowed my eyes at him. “You ain’t drunk.”

  “Can’t drive home.” He rolled onto his side, taking me with him, and tucked me into the curve of his body, one muscled thigh wedged between both of mine. His eyelids slid closed and his breath heaved out on a long sigh, and his voice went low and soft again. “I love you so much, baby.”

  My heart jumped into my throat and froze there, stiff as an frost covered grass. “What?”

  His body went limp against mine, and I lay there beside him consumed by the words spoken when he was too open to keep ‘em hid.

  Danged if I didn’t fall asleep contemplating the finer points of mine and Riley’s relationship.

  I woke in the middle of the night still dressed in my witchy Goth dress, denim jacket, and boots, snuggled up to a furnace. It took my sleep befuddled noggin a minute to put two and two together and come up with Riley, and when it did, the confusion what worried me into Morpheus’ embrace popped up again, clear as a bell.

  Riley loved me? When in tarnation had that happened? And what was I gonna do about it?

  He muttered in his sleep and buried his face in the nape of my neck. His arm was a loose rope around my middle, comforting and easy and not one bit
restrictive. Didn’t wanna wake him, but I couldn’t sleep the way I was neither, so I eased out from under his arm one inch at a time and crept off the bed.

  The light was still on. I chuckled softly and yawned my way to the door, flipped the light off. Backtracked and tucked Riley under the sheet and a quilt, then stripped down to my panties, slipped on an old-t-shirt, and gathered a spare pillow and quilt.

  Riley could say what he wanted. I weren’t in no way ready to spend the night beside him, tempting as he was.

  I dumped the pillow and quilt on the couch, and took a minute to gather his clothes into a pile outta the way so he wouldn’t stumble on ‘em in the middle of the night and maybe damage his hip.

  Them scars. Dear Lord, why’d it have to be him?

  But them scars brung him back to me, in a roundabout way. Weren’t for him getting hurt, he never woulda come back home and gone to college and took that job with Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources. He woulda never been here to know about Belinda Arrowood’s monster catfish problem, the hussy, and he woulda never tried to rekindle mine and his friendship.

  I was thankful for him being here, truly, but not at the price of his pain. Even now, after all these years, instinct screamed at me to protect him, to yank away ever thing threatening him harm. Thing was, weren’t no protecting him from the past, was there, nor me neither. Only thing we could do was move forward with what we was give.

  Funny. I was near about certain Riley was a gift. Now, if I could just figure out what to do with him, I might be a sight wiser on this whole relationship schtick.

  I bumped the heat up a notch, waited ‘til it clanked and whirred and heat sputtered outta the vents, then snuggled down on the couch wrapped in a quilt instead of Riley’s arms, like the dang fool I was.

  Human eyes in a cat’s face haunted my dreams. A black painter chased me through the deep wood, too quiet and canny. It spoke to me, a hissing rumble what sounded oddly female and ancient.

  Your time has come, Sunshine Walkingstick.

  I startled awake and squinted at the early morning sunlight streaming through the living room windows onto the aqua carpet. What in tarnation was I doing sleeping in here?

  Oh, right. Riley.

  A funny heat coiled down low between my thighs, and I curled into a ball, reflexively holding the feeling close. Riley Treadwell was asleep in my bed, or had been when I went to sleep. Curiosity prodded me to find out which. I elbowed my way upright and peered out the far window overlooking the front yard, and sure enough, there sat his Range Rover, still parked next to the IROC. ‘Less he hoofed it home half-drunk in the middle of the night, he was still occupying a large chunk of my mattress.

  I flopped back down amidst the heat of desire and the ruins of that last dream. Your time has come. Maybe so, maybe not so, but one thing was for certain. It was past time I figured out why so many painters was popping up in the deep wood, and why one singled me out last night.

  The library. They’d have books on big cats, surely, and if not, I could order a couple through inter-library loan. While I was there, I could search through back issues of Foxfire Magazine for painter tales. Seemed like there was a slew of old folklore about painters dating from the time of the Cherokee on through the county’s early settlement by white folk, if memory served correct, and since I read ‘em pretty recent, it should. That orta make a good start on my dilemma.

  I slung the quilt off and bopped down the hallway, switched to a tiptoe in the bedroom. As suspected, Riley was sprawled across the bed, one arm flung across his closed eyes, the other stretched toward where I slept. The covers was halfway down that long, lean body of his, revealing a mite too much flesh for my peace of mind. I tucked ‘em up to his chest, hesitated a minute and thought long and hard about what it meant to have him there, resting safe and sound in a place I never allowed myself to dream on, not once in all the years I knowed him.

  No matter what I told myself, no matter how hard I tried to kill her off, that hurt little girl still held a part of me. Riley’d been her salvation, and he was my friend now, if nothing else.

  I leaned down and brushed a soft kiss across his forehead, then gathered clean clothes quiet as I could and let a long, hot shower wash away the uneasiness clinging to me after them dreams.

  Riley was still asleep when I come out wearing a black t-shirt and jeans with Missy’s ring hanging ‘round my neck. I gathered up my boots and shut the bedroom door behind myself, then checked the time. Eight oh seven, still way too early for the library to open on a Saturday.

  Would bacon and eggs frying on the stove turn Riley’s stomach?

  I shrugged and stuffed socked feet into my boots. Only one way to find out.

  I barely slapped bacon on a flat skillet when he stumbled into the kitchen in his underwear, one hand ruffling his auburn hair, a scowl on his face.

  “Where’d you go?” he asked.

  I prodded the sizzling bacon with the end of metal tongs. “Where’d I go when?”

  “You got up.”

  “’Course I did,” I said, cheerful like. “It’s morning.”

  He slumped into a chair at the kitchen table, arms and legs spread wide, and glared at me. “I wanted to wake up with you.”

  Seeing him sleep softened and morning grumpy was so sweet, I relented and dropped the hardass act. “How’s your head?”

  “It’s there,” he grunted. “You making enough breakfast for me?”

  “No hangover?”

  “I didn’t drink that much.”

  “You were sloppy drunk with it.”

  “Not that sloppy,” he muttered, and I narrowed my eyes at him. So he had been fooling me last night, the scamp. See if I let him have my bed again.

  That insidious heat curled into me, hang it all. If that’s all it took to rev my engine, maybe I should let him in my bed more often rather than not.

  I harrumphed and twisted back around, and prodded the bacon a bit harder than I orta.

  “Can I borrow your shower?” he asked.

  “Borrow away. I ain’t brought in spare clothes yet.”

  “I’ll get them.” His chair scraped back and his bare feet thumped light against the floor, and his body bumped against mine from behind. “I like waking up to you, Sunshine.”

  I endured the tickling kiss he smacked to the side of my neck, bit my lip against a giggle. “Go on with you, now.”

  “Your wish is my command, baby.”

  And he strolled outside in his boxer briefs for all the world to see whilst my cheeks flamed and burned, and I struggled between hoping nobody’d spot him and wishing he’da spent a minute more cuddled up behind me.

  Chapter Eight

  Riley wolfed down breakfast a mite too fast for a hangover struck man, arousing my suspicions all over again. Weren’t nothing to say, really. I didn’t resent him being there, and he was such good company, I couldn’t hardly push him away.

  After breakfast was eat and the kitchen set to rights, we headed out to the library. Riley insisted on tagging along. Said we could go from there up to Glenville Lake near Cashiers and eat pizza at this place a friend of a friend told him about.

  Now, there’s where I shoulda been warned what maybe Riley knowed me a mite too well. I was a sucker for pizza, a rare treat I never allowed myself too much of. If my home cooking was the way to his heart, pizza was sure enough the way to mine. Reckon he knowed it, too, and weren’t one whit hesitant to take advantage of my weakness, more’s the pity.

  The library parking lot was near empty when Riley parked his Range Rover in a spot close to the entrance. He held the doors open for me, then excused himself to gander the new releases shelves in hopes of finding the latest C.J. Box book.

  I hit the computer catalog and run a search for wild cats. Lots of returns popped up, mostly on domestic breeds. I writ down the Dewey decimal numbers of the ones what weren’t and trudged to the back for a good look-see.

  Just past the paperback rack, I about run over Je
nny Brookshire, she what woulda been Henry’s first teacher if the deep wood hadn’t took him. She was carrying a stack of half a dozen books, most of ‘em more’n three inches thick.

  I reached out a steadying hand and offered her a smile. “Howdy, Miss Jenny. Long time, no see.”

  A shy smile blossomed across her pretty mouth. “We should try running into each other outside the library.”

  “Yup, we should.” The title of the top book caught my eye. Thucydides. It rung a faint bell. “More Greek history?”

  “I just can’t help myself.”

  Me, I was glad we didn’t all have that problem. It was hard enough keeping up with the myths and legends the monsters I hunted was drawn from, or vice versa. Learning actual history was a good sight beyond me.

  But it weren’t beyond all in my acquaintance. I hid a once over of Jenny behind a quick blink. She was smart and pretty in a classy sorta way, and always dressed neat as a pin.

  And she had a thing for ancient Greeks.

  A grin stretched my mouth plum from ear to ear. “You seeing anybody, Miss Jenny?”

  The faint smile lingering on her face dimmed and she shifted the books in her arms. “Why, no, I’m not.”

  “I got this friend.” Well, he weren’t exactly a friend, but close enough. “Probably knows more Greek history than any scholar on record.”

  “Oh, well, I…” Her cheeks flushed pink and she glanced away. “I’m not sure I’m ready to meet someone.”

  Her fiancé dumped her. I near about kicked myself when that tidbit popped into my head. Trust tactless idjit me to bring up a painful piece of somebody’s past. “Sorry. Shouldn’ta said nothing.”

  Her gray eyes flashed back to mine and her smile reappeared. “I appreciate the thought, Sunshine. It was sweet of you to mention him.”